Literature, Language and Change: From Chaucer to the Present

How did the rise of polite society change the language of literature? What was the effect of Romanticism on poetic word order? How does knowing the answers to these questions alter the meaning of a text for us?

Reading literature is a quest for sense, involving us in a need to grasp both how meaning is produced by the words on the page and how history, culture and ideology have influenced the choice of those words. Literary English changes from period to period as it reflects variations in the society and culture in which it is produced – variations in the ways writers construct images of their world, shifts in the relationships between readers, texts and writers, and linguistic change.

First published in 1990, Literature, Language and Change offers a historical perspective on literary English, from the mid-fourteenth century to the twentieth century. Through detailed analyses of individual texts and comparisons with texts from different periods, Stephens and Waterhouse build up a picture of the important and distinctive characteristics of each period and of the changes between them.