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Essays cover medieval and Renaissance drama as well as the works of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Restoration playwrights

The Victorian age was one whose principal tenets were progress and individualism, and one characterized by Tennyson as "an awful moment of transition". In this volume introductory essays on aspects of Victorian thought, faith and doubt lead into chapters on the major novelists and poets of the period, as well as pieces on women prose-writers, fantasy and nonsense, the Victorian theatre and the fin de siecle.

This collection is edited to reflect the changing nature of criticism and scholarship in relation to literature in the 20th century.

This volume of The Penguin History of Literature is devoted to its medium, the English language. A first section considers present-day English, its sounds, grammar, vocabulary and stylistic varieties. A second section describes the growth of the language over the centuries and concludes with chapters on the social context of English-language studies and the role of English in the modern world. While each essay stands complete in itself, the book is designed to provide a grounding in the modern language through which to explore past developments. It constitutes an introduction to the subject, and full biographies point the way to further investigation.