British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom along with that of Isles of Man and Channel Islands. For purposes of focused study, it has been divided into Middle Ages, Elizabethan period, Restoration era, Romantic period, Victorian era and the Modern period. Although literature of earlier times exists, Geoffrey Chaucer, the 14th century poet is said to be the first most important exponent of British Literature.
The present work Studies in British Literature covers the representative writers right from Geoffrey Chaucer to Julian Barnes. All the great works of the great writers are represented here. So one can find articles on writers like Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Fielding, Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Brontë, Ruskin, George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Hopkins, Shaw, Kipling, Yeats, Synge, T. S. Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Beckett and Barnes. References have been given to several others in the text. All this is an interesting and useful endeavour. The articles are critical, comprehensive and updated.
The book provides a glimpse of British Literature under one cover. It will ably serve the needs of students, teachers and researchers of English Literature, particularly British Literature.
Mallikarjun Patil, M.A., Ph.D from Karnataka University, is a novelist, short-story writer, translator and critic. He is a distinguished academician, being a Reader in English, Karnataka University, Dharwad. He has written numerous articles and two works on Thomas Hardy, apart from Studies in American Literature and British Literature. His novel When the Ground Shakes Beneath has been translated into Kannada, Punjabi and Hindi. His A Don in the Jungle is a political novel on the forest brigand of yesteryears, Veerappan. He has translated Bajranga Korde’s English work Anna Bhau Sathe into Kannada for Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. In Shakespeare’s England is a travel account of his education at Oxford and his visit to various places in England.
