British and Irish Literature

Literature in English from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, from the medieval period to the twentieth century, treated as one tradition the way English-language literary history itself usually is. Belongs here: Chaucer, Shakespeare and the whole line of English poetry, drama and the novel through to Woolf and Tolkien, and Irish writers working in the same English literary institutions such as Swift and Beckett. Does not belong here: an American author, placed separately below despite the shared language, because the two traditions diverged into distinct national literatures after independence.