Literature, Language and Change: From Chaucer to the Present

How did the rise of polite society change the language of literature? What was the effect of Romanticism on poetic word order? How does knowing the answers to these questions alter the meaning of a text for us?

Reading literature is a quest for sense, involving us in a need to grasp both how meaning is produced by the words on the page and how history, culture and ideology have influenced the choice of those words. Literary English changes from period to period as it reflects variations in t...