The study of literature has long left the study of the “novel‐in‐itself” far behind. Now students are asked to “contextualise” an author's work, to relate what an author writes to the socio‐politico‐cultural background in which he or she, and their contemporary readers, lived. Novelists, dramatists and poets write what they write in response (directly or indirectly) to events taking place in the world around them, to ideas that feature in discussion, and to contemporary art and architecture. Jane Eyre is not just a story of a shy orphan girl developing into an independent thinking woman, but a reaction to, for example, dame‐school education and the plight of governesses, the nature of the aristocracy, the role of the clergy, and marriage laws of the 1840s. John Braine's Room at the Top needs to be studied in the context of 1957 local government and northern industrialism. To aid this understanding the student needs to relate the author's work to the author's world. In The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and Its Contexts, 1500‐2000, Professor Widdowson has provided what one reviewer, quoted on the cover blurb, describes as a “readable contextualised chronology”, and another proclaims as an indicator of “relevant historical and cultural contexts and intertexts”.
The book is basically a chronology of events from the English Renaissance to the year 2000. For every one of these 500 years events are noted under the headings: “International and political contexts”; “Social and cultural contexts”; “UK authors”; and “Indicative titles”. Thus for 1516 we see that Princess Mary (Mary Tudor) was born, that Erasmus edits the Greek New Testament, Ariosto writes Orlando Furioso, St George's Chapel at Windsor was completed, Titian started work on the Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece, and that Sir Thomas More's Utopia was published in Latin (by Erasmus). (Understandably, past and present tenses tend to get a little muddled!) Entries get fuller the nearer we get to our own time. Among the plethora of events for 1973 we learn (or are reminded) that 500 million people watched Princess Anne's wedding on TV; that Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was published in the West; The Rocky Horror Show opens in London; Picasso dies; the films American Graffiti and Live and Let Die were shown; and, under the rubric Theory/Crit: Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment was translated into English, as was also Derrida's Difference.
The chronologies are the major feature of the book, but they are, annoyingly, printed at right angles to the normal portrait mode. Thus one has to turn the book through 90 degrees and read from top (earliest) to bottom of each two‐page spread. The detail, though, is impressive and no student will lack material.
Interspersed throughout the book are prose introductions to the nine major literary periods into which the book is divided. The main events of the period are noted, and how they impacted on the literature of the period. Full details are given of how to use this book, and there is a bibliography of referenced works, an index of the British authors featured, and key terms and concepts glossed in chapter headnotes (!). The student market is obvious throughout.
There is still much to be said of the relationship between events, images and ideas, and published writing. Thus it may be a matter of years before events re‐emerge in the work of an author and some scrolling back in time will be needed. The mere statement that an event took place can give no flavour of its import or significance. And then there is the whole problem of interpreting an author's work, of literary criticism. The compiler is aware of such issues, but his central premise, that historical knowledge is an essential tool in understanding the significance of any cultural production, is valid, and this book is an excellent starting point.
Since there are already numerous chronologies around, even ones to English literature, for example Smallwood (1985), it is perhaps the wealth of detail that marks out this book for attention, although to claim, as one of the aforementioned reviewers does, that this book should be on “… shelves alongside a decent dictionary, Brewer's and Roget's Thesaurus”, is more than a tad overstated! Most libraries will have a range of standard histories of English literature and a number of chronologies on their shelves that they may feel adequate, but libraries supporting the teaching of English literature will find this book a useful addition to their stock.
