The Oxford History Of English

This text traces the language from its obscure Indo-European roots to its 21st-century position as the world's first language. It describes the history of English within the British Isles, its changing roles in different places, and its rise to global pre-eminence.

Lynda Mugglestone's hugely popular The Oxford History of English is now updated and entirely reset in a new edition featuring David Crystal's new take on the future of English in the wider world. In accounts made vivid with examples from a vast range of documentary evidence that includes letters, diaries, and private records, fifteen scholars trace the history of English from its ancient Indo-European origins to the present. They cover the language's versions, written and spoken, revel in its rich variety over fifteen centuries, and chart its varied progress nationally, regionally, and throughout the world. With scholarship at once impeccable and approachable, the authors describe and explain the constantly changing sounds, words, meanings, and grammar of English. This is a book for everyone interested in the language, present and past.

This ambitious handbook takes advantage of recent advances in the study of the history of English to rethink the understanding of the field.

Traces the history of English literature from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the present day.

A guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. The volume includes information on Old and Middle English, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romantics, Victorian and Edwardian literature, Modernism, and post-war writing.

The dark ages of English history between the collapse of Roman rule in the early fifth century and the emergence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the seventh century are examined in this study, which draws attention to political and social factors linking Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England.

Volume II of the Oxford History of the British Empire examines the history of British worldwide expansion from the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a crucial phase in the creation of the modern British Empire. This is the age of General Wolfe, Clive of India, and Captain Cook. The international team of experts deploy the latest scholarly research to trace and analyse development and expansion over more than a century. They show how trade, warfare, and migration created an Empire, at first overwhelmingly in the Americas but later increasingly in Asia. Although the Empire was ruptured by the American Revolution, it survived and grew into the British Empire that was to dominate the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. series blurb The Oxford History of the British Empire is a major new assessment of the Empire in the light of recent scholarship and the progressive opening of historical records. It deals with the interaction of British and non-western societies from the Elizabethan era to the late twentieth century, aiming to provide a balanced treatment of the ruled as well as the rulers, and to take into account the significance of the Empire for the peoples of the British Isles. It explores economic and social trends as well as political.

This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in fundamental ways, the momentous period in our literary history, for they are the long moment in which the category of literature itself emerged as English writing began to insist, for the first time, that it floated free of any social reality or function. This book also charts the complex mechanisms by which English writing acquired this power in a series of linked close readings of both canonical and more obscure texts. It encloses those readings in five compelling accounts of much broader cultural areas, describing, in particular, the productive relationship of Middle English writing to medieval technology, insurgency, statecraft and cultural place, concluding with an in depth account of the particular arguments, emphases and techniques English writers used to claim a wholly new jurisdiction for their work. Both this history and its readings are everywhere informed by the most exciting developments in recent Middle English scholarship as well as literary and cultural theory. It serves as an introduction to all these areas as well as a contribution, in its own right, to each of them.