A First Book of English Literature Author:George Saintsbury General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1914 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: English literature Literary Collections / General Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrati... more »ons and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE, A. D. 12OO-140O Circumstances of the change from Old to Middle English -- Length of the transition -- Results of it about A. d. 1200 -- Layamon -- The Ormulum -- The Moral Ode -- The Ancren Riwle -- Literature from 1200 to 1250 -- The new Genesis and Exodus, The Owl and the Nightingale, etc. -- Real interest in early M. E. literature -- Fresh beginning after apparent lull about 1298 -- Robert of Gloucester and verse-history -- " Romance," its origin and subject -- Its literary character -- English examples -- The alliterative revival -- Lyric -- Hampole -- The fourteenth century -- Prose and drama -- The appearance of great individual writers -- Langland -- The Vision of Piers Plowman -- Gower -- The Confessio Amantis -- Chaucer -- His general character and earlier work -- The Canterbury Tales -- Great advance of literary character in them -- Account of this in detail -- Chaucer's diction -- His versification -- His prose -- The library in 1400. Circum- It will have been seen from the last chapter that Old stances of English, or Anglo-Saxon, literature was by no means from Okf6 " poor and beggarly," but that it was limited, and that to Middle certain inherent deficiencies made it unable to exceed ng s ' its limits without external help. For a time it seemed as if the external influence would be one rather of hindrance. The old delusion that the Norman Conquest directly kil...« less