When we delve into the rich variety of novels, poems and plays which constitute English Literature we read works that have lasted for generations, even centuries, and they have lasted because they are good. These works say something good to say and say it with art strong enough to survive while less work fall into oblivion.
Literature is part of our cultural heritage which is freely accessible all of which can enrich our lives in all sorts of ways. Once we have broken the barriers that make studying literature seem daunting, we find that literary works can be entertaining, beautiful, funny or tragic. They can demonstrate the depth of thought, richness of emotion, and an overview of characters. They take us beyond our limited experience of life to show us the lives of other people in other moments. They stir us intellectually and emotionally, and deepen our understanding of our history, our society and our own individual lives.
In the vast literature of the past, we find the England of our ancestors, and we are not only seeing the country and people as they were but it also washes up the climate of the times through the language itself, its vocabulary, grammar, and tone. We should consider the writing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boswell, Dickens and Samuel Beckett side by side to see how the way writers use language embodies the cultural atmosphere their time.
Literature can also give us an overview of much earlier ages. Glimpses of Celtic Ireland in the poetry of WB Yeats, or Romans in Shakespeare's plays, for example, can take us back to our imaginary roots of our culture and sense of continuity and change we get the survey of our history, we will enhance our understanding of our modern world.
Literature can enrich our experience in other respects. London, for example, is all the more interesting a city when behind what we see today, we see the London known to Dickens, Boswell and Johnson, or Shakespeare. And our sense of nature can be deepened when a landscape evokes images of, say, Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, or Ted Hughes.
The world of English literature consists, apart from anything else, an amazing array of characters, from The Noble – despicable representations of people of all backgrounds involved in all sorts of activities. Through their characters great authors express their viewpoints in the human nature, and we may find that we can better understand the people we know if we recognize in them the characteristics that we encountered in literature. Maybe we see that the behavior of a man is like that of Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, or some woman is a little like The Wife of Bath in the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. Seeing these similarities can help us understand and accept other people.
Although works of literature are not museum pieces, preserved and studied only for historical interest. They last because they remain fresh, transcending well as the expression of the time they were written. Each reader read each work is a new event and unique, and the works speak for us now, tell us truths about human life that are relevant to all times.
We did not need to read far before finding a writer who portrays a character who is somewhat like us, face life experiences somewhat like ours and where we are up with the struggles of a character may be telling us the struggles to come to our own lives. And when one is moved by a poem, it can enrich us by putting words to feelings that had remained dormant for lack of a way of expressing them, or have been forgotten long cycle in the daily workplace, supermarket, traffic congestion, and TV news.
We can learn much from the literature many ways, but the most rewarding experiences can come in those moments when one feels the author has communicated something personally to us one individual to another. These moments can help validate our personal experience at a depth that is rarely reached by everyday life or the media mass.
So why do we need to study English literature instead of just read? Well, we do not need to, but when you visit a country for the first time, it can help to have books by people who have been there before with us.
When we begin to read literature, especially the older works, we must accept that we are not going to get the instant gratification we have become used to from popular entertainment. We must make an effort to adapt to the use of the writer's language, and appreciate the ideas he proposes. Criticism can help us make this transition, and can help complete our understanding we say something about the social climate in which a book was written, or the personal situation of the author while he was writing.
We're not going to enjoy every literary work, and there may be times when we find critical reading is more interesting than reading the work real. Reading the work of a good critic can be edifying in itself. Make the effort to develop our own thoughts in an essay is also an edifying experience, and just as good literature lasts, so the personal benefits that we gain from studying and writing about it.
Whether one chooses to study or read for pleasure, when we look back over our literature we look back over incredible richness. Not just museum pieces, but works of life that we can buy in bookshops, borrow from the library, or download from the Internet and read today, now.
Ian Mackean runs the sites http://www.literature-study-online.com, which features a substantial collection of Resources and Essays, (and where his site on Short Story Writing can also be found,) and http://www.Booksmadeintomovies.com. He is the editor of The Essentials of Literature in English post-1914, ISBN 0340882689, which was published by Hodder Arnold in 2005. (When not writing about literature or short story writing he is a keen amateur photographer, and has made a site of his photography at http://www.photo-zen.com)
