History of English Language

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

COURSE CODE :4 B 06 ENG

Part A – History of English Language:--

·          Theories of the origin of languages

·          Language families

·          The Indo European family

·          Descent of English

·          Old/Middle/Modern English

·          Renaissance, Reformation and the growth of English language

·          Word formation

·         Individual contributors to the growth of English language (Shakespeare, Milton)

·          Loan words

·          Semantic changes

·         Varieties of English language of the present time (American, Indian(Hinglish),  Chinglish, Pidgin, Creole, SMS and chat English)

Part B – History of English Literature:--

The periods/movements listed below are for extensive study. The works/authors given in bracket are for intensive study.

·         Old English literature (Beowulf)

·         Middle English literature (Chaucer, Langland)

·         Early Renaissance (Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney – Miracle/Morality plays)

·         Height of Renaissance (Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe)

·         Decline of Renaissance/Puritanism/Restoration (Ben Jonson, Milton, Banyan)

·         Neo-classical/Seventeenth Century literature (Dryden, Pope, Addison, Steele, Johnson)

·         Rise and growth of novel (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Swift, Scott, Austen)

·         Romantic Revolt (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron)

·         Victorian literature (Poetry (Tennyson, Brownings, Arnold) – Novel (Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontes, Hardy, Henry James) – Drama (Shaw, Oscar

·         Twentieth Century (Novel (Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf) – Poetry (Yeats, Eliot,

·         Larkin, Gunn, Hughes, Heaney) – Drama (Pinter, Osborne, Beckett)

·         New literatures (Commonwealth/Post colonial/Subaltern – general account)