English literature: Nonfiction

Among the Victorian masters of nonfiction were the great Whig historian Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, the historian, social critic, and prophet whose rhetoric thundered through the age. Influential thinkers included John Stuart Mill, the great liberal scholar and philosopher; Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientist and popularizer of Darwinian theory; and John Henry, Cardinal Newman, who wrote earnestly of religion, philosophy, and education. The founders of Communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, researched and wrote their books in the free environment of England. The great art historian and critic John Ruskin also concerned himself with social and economic problems. Matthew Arnold's theories of literature and culture laid the foundations for modern literary criticism, and his poetry is also notable.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• The Postwar Era to the Present
• The Early Twentieth Century
• Poetry
• Nonfiction
• The Novel
• The Victorian Age
• The Romantic Period
• The Eighteenth Century
• The Jacobean Era, Cromwell, and the Restoration
• The Tudors and the Elizabethan Age
• Bibliography

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