Introduction

Literature is at least as old as the fifth millennium B.C, and has accompanied mankind's most daring efforts to carve a place for culture in the slippery surface of time. The first sustained writing records are of accounting and inventorying, but it was not long before writing became the record of preference for preserving past events and giving interpretations of the world. It is no wonder that literature has made itself a faithful chronicler of human woes, as well as of human joys.

British culture is a relatively old Western culture. To read Beowulf, dating from the eighth century, is to reach into the recesses of Norse and Anglo-Saxon experience, and into the outposts of the Roman Empire. With the Norman invasion of the eleventh century, the tapestry of British culture grows richer. The faint hues...