The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English [antikvár]

ForewordThis Companion to Literature in English, although a comprehensive, authoritative, and up-to-date reference book, is more than that. It is alsó a testamenc to the amazing rangé and vitality of the English language itself.After its early Anglo-Saxon beginnings, English was profoundly altered by the Norman Conquest of the eleventh century, developed the strength of hybrids and blossomed accordingly. As any translator can teli you, it now contains more words than any other language. As any translator can alsó teli you, it is grammatically unruly, baffling idiomatic, and frustrating to learn. Nevertheless, in dozens of countries and as many cultures, it has flourished.Possibly because of its mixed ancestry, English, unlike somé lan-guages, has never insisted on its own purity. It has grown by assimila-tion, of words from foreign languages, from dialects, and from its own ever-active slang. It has never been afraid of neologisms, puns, word-play and slogans. From Chaucer and Shakespeare to the present, it has been in love with the vernacular, and its best writers have not strayed far from the rhythms and vocabularies of speech. A language that ceas-es to be spoken, and therefore to grow and change, becomes a dead language; but even the briefest glancé at any page of this companion will indicate that the English language is far from dead.Perhaps we should say 'the English languages', since, being a vitai organism, English has mutated, producing many variants which share its main characteristics but which have diverged to become species recognizable in their own right. Thus novels by, for instance, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe or Anita Desai may contain words and even grammatical constructions which are foreign to reader of the British Isles; American English may sound strange to an Australian, West Indián English to a Canadian; yet each of these 'Englishes' can be read by any English speaker, who, by virtue of common ground, is in a position to make at least an educated guess at understanding.In the past, English followed in the wake of Empire: part of the richness of its written culture has been due to the successes of its navies and armies. Now, however, a good deal of its colour and variety is