Presents a personal and thematic journey through English literature from Chaucer to the present
Chapter and Verse: A Reader's History of English Literature offers a compelling reimagining of literary history—one that places the reader's experience at the heart of the narrative. Unlike traditional surveys of English literature that prioritize chronology and critical consensus, Peter Brown's approach emphasizes the subjective, evolving relationship between reader and text. This unique perspective addresses a long-standing gap in the field, emphasizing the emotional and intellectual engagements that shape how literature is received, remembered, and reinterpreted across a lifetime.
Structured around thematic chapters—such as “Performance,” “Fragments,” and “Home”— Chapter and Verse spans the medieval to the contemporary, exploring Chaucer, Shakespeare, Eliot, and other canonical figures alongside neglected or overlooked authors such as Charlotte Dacre and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Each chapter blends literary analysis with personal narrative, beginning with formative reading experiences and culminating in a scholarly vantage point honed over decades of teaching. The result is both intimate and instructive, offering detailed engagements with texts and authors contextualized within broader literary movements.
Uniquely integrating personal memoir with a thematic and chronological overview of English literature, Chapter and Verse:
- Explores literature's emotional and transformative power through lived reading experiences
- Reflects decades of university-level teaching across the full span of English literary history
- Provides accessible entry points into complex literary periods through thematic framing
- Includes notes and recommended readings at the end of each chapter to encourage further exploration
- Offers a fresh pedagogical approach that highlights how personal engagement can enhance critical analysis
Chapter and Verse: A Reader's History of English Literature is a must-read for advanced secondary students, undergraduates, and postgraduates studying English literature, as well as general readers seeking a more personal connection to the history of English literature.
Table of Contents:
Timeline xi
Prologue xiv
Acknowledgements xix
1 ‘In the Beginning’: How Religion Fostered Poetry, Narrative and Drama 1
Initiation 1
The Book of Common Prayer 5
Drama of the Liturgy 8
Mystery Plays 9
The Canterbury Crucifixion 12
Continuity and Change 16
Notes 17
2 ‘… Was the Word’: On Being Taught ‘English Literature’ 19
A Bookish Man 19
Hanley High School 21
Encountering Geoffrey Chaucer 23
Revolt 32
Notes 35
3 Romance: Love Stories from Ancient Troy and the Court of King Arthur 38
Carmountside 38
Romance 40
Chaucer Revisited 42
Embraces 47
The Gawain Poet 49
Thomas Malory 55
Notes 61
4 Translations: Inspirations from Other Cultures 63
Translating and Adapting 63
Radical Shifts 65
William Langland 68
Allegory 73
Edmund Spenser 75
Philip Sidney 78
The Sonnet Craze 80
Notes 83
5 Performance: Playacting on Stage and in Everyday Life 85
Roleplay 85
Shakespeare’s Theatre 89
John Donne 94
Lancelot Andrewes 97
George Herbert 98
Silent Actors 99
John Milton 101
Aphra Behn 104
Notes 106
6 Difference: The Age of Satire and the Birth of the Novel 109
A Mistake 109
John Dryden 112
Alexander Pope 114
Jonathan Swift 116
Daniel Defoe 118
Henry Fielding 120
Laurence Sterne 122
In the Archives 123
New Perspectives 125
Notes 128
7 Margins: Breaking the Frame 131
Relevance 131
William Blake 134
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 136
John Clare 140
Lord Byron 142
John Keats 145
Percy Bysshe Shelley 147
Mary Shelley 149
Charlotte Dacre 153
Jane Austen 154
Notes 157
8 Identity: Work in Progress 160
Sink or Swim 160
Charlotte Brontë 165
Emily Brontë 167
Anne Brontë 169
W M Thackeray 171
Charles Dickens 173
George Eliot 176
Anthony Trollope 181
Robert Browning 183
Elizabeth Barrett 184
Notes 186
9 Fragments: The World Upended 188
Garbutt’s Ark 188
Thomas Hardy 191
Joseph Conrad 195
D H Lawrence 199
Poetry of the First World War 202
Early T S Eliot 210
Notes 212
10 Home: Sanctuary and Exile 214
The Sewing Kit 214
James Joyce 217
Virginia Woolf 222
George Orwell 226
Later Eliot 228
W H Auden 229
John Osborne 231
Samuel Beckett 232
Seamus Heaney 233
Abdulrazak Gurnah 234
Notes 238
Epilogue 240
Index 245
About the Author :
PETER BROWN is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kent and former Academic Director of its Paris School of Arts and Culture. A Fulbright Scholar and founding editor-in-chief of Literature Compass, he also serves as general editor of the Blackwell Histories of Literature series. His teaching portfolio spans the full breadth of English literary history in both the UK and the US.
