Table of Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION TO THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM

• Political Parties and Royal Allegiances
  Imperial Expansion
  The Romantic Mind and Its Literary Productions
  The Business of Literature
  “Romantic”
  A Changing Language

INTRODUCTION TO THE VICTORIAN ERA

• A Growing Power
  Grinding Mills, Grinding Poverty
  Corn Laws, Potato Famine
  “The Two Nations”
  The Politics of Gender
  Empire
  Faith and Doubt
  Victorian Domesticity: Life and Death
  Cultural Trends
  Technology
  Cultural Identities
  Realism
  The Victorian Novel
  Poetry
  Drama
  Prose Non-Fiction and Print Culture
  The English Language in the Victorian Era

INTRODUCTION TO THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY: FROM 1900 TO MID-CENTURY

• The Edwardian Period
  The World Wars
  Marx, Einstein, Freud, and Modernism
  The Place of Women
  Avant-Garde and Mass Culture
  Sexual Orientation
  Ireland
  Ideology and Economics in the 1930s and 1940s
  The Literature of the 1930s and 1940s
  Literature and Empire
  The English Language in the Early Twentieth Century

INTRODUCTION TO THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND: 1945 TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

• The End of the War and the Coming of the Welfare State
  The End of Empire
  From the 1960s to Century’s End
  Ireland, Scotland, Wales
  The New Millennium
  The History of the English Language

Monarchs and Prime Ministers of Great Britain
Index