Backus, Truman J., LL.D. The Outlines of Literature, English and American, based upon Shaw’s Manual of English Literature. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1897.
PREFACE
The New History of English Literature, published in 1884, was a revision of Shaw’s Manual of English Literature. The Manual had been used for ten years by students in American schools and colleges, and had gained a far wider circulation than any other volume dealing with its theme. The New History, with its improved typography, its better arrangement, and its fresh material, displaced the earlier book and gained yet higher commendation.
This volume, The Outlines of Literature, English and American, is more than a revision of the New History. Line by line the statements and opinions of that volume have been weighed and verified, much that seemed superfluous has been omitted, new chapters have been added, the book has been rewritten, and new allotments of space and improved arrangements have been secured. The student of this book will have constant reminder of the inseparable relations of the history and the literature of a people, and will find the literatures of England and America divided into periods corresponding to distinct periods of national history.
The discussion of American authors in this volume seeks to awaken students to due appreciation of the literary achievements of our countrymen.
Summaries of chapters and references for collateral readings—much commended features of the New History—have been simplified and enlarged for this book; and extended lists of authors discussed in these pages are furnished for convenient reference, together with authentic dates and with the title of the chief work or the kind of work done by each author.
Grateful acknowledgments of the help in preparing the book for the press are made to Mrs. Helen Hiscock Backus; to Edmund K. Alden, Professor of History at the Packer Collegiate Institute; to Dr. A. F. Nightingale, Superintendent of High Schools, Chicago, Ill.; to Professor Henry L. Blotwood, Evanston, Ill.; and to Professor D. O. Kellogg, of Philadelphia.
TRUMAN J. BACKUS
The Packer Collegiate Institute
Brooklyn, N.Y., June 15, 1897.
CONTENTS
PART I
Chapter I: Prefatory
Chapter II: Historical Epochs
THE FIRST PERIOD: ENGLISH LITERATURE BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST
Chapter III: Old English
THE SECOND PERIOD: FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO THE TUDORS
Chapter IV: Under the Norman Kings
Chapter V: The Plantagenet Epoch to Chaucer
Chapter VI: Geoffrey Chaucer
Chapter VII: Chaucer’s Contemporaries
Chapter VIII: From Chaucer to Caxton
THE THIRD PERIOD: THE TUDORS, INCLUDING THE ELIZABETHAN AGE
Chapter IX: The Tudor Period to Spenser
Chapter X: Non-Dramatic Elizabethan Poets. Edmund Spenser
Chapter XI: Non-Dramatic Elizabethan Poets--continued
Chapter XII: The Dawn of the English Drama
Chapter XIII: William Shakespeare
Chapter XIV: The Shakespearean Dramatists
Chapter XV: Prose Literature of the Elizabethan Period
THE FOURTH PERIOD: THE AGE OF THE STUARTS AND THE AUGUSTAN AGE
Chapter XVI: The So-Called Metaphysical Poets
Chapter XVII: Theological Writers of the Civil War and Commonwealth
Chapter XVIII: John Milton
Chapter XIX: Literature of the Restoration
Chapter XX: John Dryden
Chapter XXI: The Corrupt Drama
Chapter XXII: Philosophers and Theologians of Locke’s Time
Chapter XXIII: The Critical Poets
THE FIFTH PERIOD: HANOVERIAN AGE TO THE FIRST EMPIRE OF NAPOLEON
Chapter XXIV: Prose Writers of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
Chapter XXV: The First Great Novelists
Chapter XXVI: Historical Writers of the Eighteenth Century
Chapter XXVII: Ethical, Political, and Theological Writers of the Later Half of the Eighteenth Century
Chapter XXVIII: The Dawn of Romantic Poetry
Chapter XXIX: Walter Scott
THE SIXTH PERIOD: THE MODERN AND VICTORIAN AGE
Chapter XXX: Byron, Moore, Shelley, Keats, and Campbell
Chapter XXXI: The Lake School --Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey
Chapter XXXII: Hunt, Landor, Hood, the Brownings, Tennyson, Clough, Rossetti, Morris
Chapter XXXIII: Historians of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter XXXIV: The Philosophical Writers of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter XXXV: The Reviewers and Essayists of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter XXXVI: The Novelists of the Nineteenth Century
PART II: English Literature in America
Introductory
Chapter I: The Colonial Period
Chapter II: The Revolutionary Period
Chapter III: The National Period
Chapter IV: Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Writers
Chapter V: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and Recent Writers of Fiction
Chapter VI: The Poets of America
Chapter VII: The American Historians
Chapter VIII: Emerson, the Concord School, and Later Essayists
Chapter IX: Schools of Contemporary American Fiction