ABSTRACT
This Chapter explains about literature in English and all of the examples consist of texts that were originally written in some version of the English language. Promoting literature in one language above or to the exclusion of, others can be a political move. In some periods Romanticism and modernism are the obvious examples European literature has been particularly international. The connections between what Coleridge wrote in England and what Friedrich Schiller wrote in Germany, or between Joyce's work and the Norwegian plays of Henrik Ibsen or the Italian novels of Italo Svevo is not coincidental. An almost infinite range of other comparisons between literature and the visual arts might be made, not just confined to comprehensive movements like Romanticism or Modernism, between eighteenth-century novels and the story-telling paintings and prints of William Hogarth. Sciences such as chemistry, biology and astrophysics have an obvious but ambiguous centrality in a particular literary genre, science fiction.
