Provides comprehensive coverage of the history of literature in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland in the major literary languages (Anglo-Saxon, English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Latin). (500 entries)
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A Mirror for Magistrates
A Mirror for Magistrates has the unenviable reputation of being a dull work that simply transposes much English history into verse and is worth reading only because Shakespeare
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Anonymous
“Anonymous,” from the Greek for “without a name,” denotes texts of unknown authorship. “Anon,” “Ignoto,” and “Incertus,” are other designations that have appeared on title pages,
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John Aubrey
John Aubrey (1626 -- 1697 ) published little in his own lifetime, but he left an enormous legacy of manuscript work which has gradually come out in the centuries since his death.
John Bale
John Bale was born on 21 November 1495 at Cove, near Dunwich in Suffolk.
Bede
Born around 673 , Bede became a monk, priest, and teacher in the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.
Beowulf
Beowulf is the most famous and most frequently translated poem in the Anglo-Saxon language (also called Old English); at 3,182 lines it is also by far the longest to have
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John Berger
There can be few writers whose work has spanned so many subject areas and who have been so consistently experimental in their approach to these areas as John Berger (born 1926 ).
John Betjeman
John Betjeman (1906 -- 1984 ) is often considered the most “English” of all twentieth-century poets.
Alexander Brome
It is now tempting to imagine that Alexander Brome (1620 -- 1666 ) was dwarfed by the literary company he kept.
The Brontës
Three sisters whose startlingly original novels created new paradigms for Victorian fiction, the Brontës wrote as unique individuals, each with her own distinctive voice and
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MyWire Reference Collection
Abbey Theatre
For seventy years prior to its purchase by Annie Elizabeth Horniman , the English heiress, theater enthusiast, and admirer of William Butler Yeats
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Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison (1672 -- 1719 ) was famous throughout the eighteenth century, not only as a man of letters but as a model of genial rationality.
Aestheticism
Aestheticism—it is not what it used to be, and yet, as many scholars have argued, it never was.
Mark Akenside
Mark Akenside was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1721 . His father was a butcher in the town, and the family lived above the shop in Butcher Bank.
Lord Tennyson Alfred
The poet Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 in Somersby, Lincolnshire; he died in 1892 as Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Farringford at his home in Aldworth,
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Almanacs
At its most basic, an almanac is a calendar that includes useful information, such as the phases of the moon, the positions of the planets, the rising and setting of the sun, and
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Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis (1922 -- 1995 ) was one of the most accomplished British novelists of the 1950s.
