Scottish literature in the 19th century, following the example of Walter Scott, tended to produce novels that did not reflect the realities of life in that period.

Robert Louis Stevenson's short novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) depicts the dual personality of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. His Kidnapped is a fast-paced historical novel set in the aftermath of the '45 Jacobite Rising, and Treasure Island is the classic pirate adventure.

The Kailyard school of Scottish writers presented an idealised version of society and brought elements of fantasy and folklore back into fashion. J. M. Barrie is one example of this mix of modernity and nostalgia.

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English language literature since 1900

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Scotland of Irish parents, but his Sherlock Holmes stories have typified a fog-filled London for readers worldwide

The major lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy, who concentrated on poetry after the harsh response to his last novel, Jude the Obscure.

The most widely popular writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, often based on his experiences in British India. Kipling was closely associated with imperialism and this has damaged his reputation in more recent times.

From around 1910, the Modernist Movement began to influence English literature. Whereas their Victorian predecessors had usually been happy to cater to mainstream middle-class taste, 20th century writers often felt alienated from it, and responded by writing more intellectually challenging works or by pushing the boundaries of acceptable content.

The major poets of this period included the American-born T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the Irishman William Butler Yeats. Free verse and other stylistic innovations came to the forefront in this era.

The experiences of the First World War were reflected in the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon. Many writers turned away from patriotic and imperialist themes as a result of the war, notably Kipling.

Important novelists between the two World Wars included the Irish writer James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.

Joyce's increasingly complex works included Ulysses, an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin, and culminated in the famously obscure Finnegans Wake. Lawrence wrote with understanding about the social life of the lower and middle classes, and the personal life of those who could not adapt to the social norms of his time. He attempted to explore human emotions more deeply than his contemporaries and challenged the boundaries of the acceptable treatment of sexual issues in works such as Lady Chatterley's Lover. Virginia Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her novels included To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, and The Waves.

Novelists who wrote in a more traditional style, such as John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett continued to receive great acclaim in the interwar period. At the same time the Georgian poets maintained a more conservative approach to poetry.

One of the most significant English writers of this period was George Orwell. An acclaimed essayist and novelist, Orwell's works are considered among the most important social and political commentaries of the 20th century. Dealing with issues such as poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four and colonialism in Burmese Days. Orwell's works were often semi-autobiographical and in the case of Homage to Catalonia, wholly autobiographical.

The leading poets of the middle and later 20th century included the traditionalist John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and the Northern Irish Catholic Seamus Heaney, who lived in the Republic of Ireland for much of his later life.

Major novelists of the middle and later 20th century included the satirist Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, Anthony Powell, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, V. S. Naipaul, Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch.

In drama, the drawing room plays of the post war period were challenged in the 1950s by the Angry Young Men, exemplified by as John Osborne's iconic play Look Back in Anger. Also in the 1950s, the bleak absurdist play Waiting for Godot, by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett profoundly affected British drama. The Theatre of the Absurd influenced playwrights of the later decades of the 20th century, including Harold Pinter, whose works are often characterized by menace or claustrophobia, and Tom Stoppard. Stoppard's works are however also notable for their high-spirited wit and the great range of intellectual issues which he tackles in different plays.

• Georgian poets
• Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
• British Poetry Revival
• Kitchen sink realism

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Non English language literatures since 1900

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Welsh literature began to reflect the way the Welsh language was increasingly becoming a political symbol. Two important literary nationalists were Saunders Lewis and Kate Roberts.

In the early 20th century in Scotland, a renaissance in the use of Lowland Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid. Other contemporaries were Douglas Young, Sidney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch and Robert McLellan. However, the revival was largely limited to verse and other literature.

The end of the First World War saw a decline in the quantity of poetry published in Jèrriais and Dgèrnésiais in favour of short-story-like newspaper columns in prose, some being collected in book or booklet form - this being a common genre in the Norman mainland. The imported eisteddfod tradition in the Channel Islands encouraged recitation and performance, a tradition that continues today. The German military occupation of the Channel Islands 1940-1945 encouraged increased use of the vernacular languages among those who remained, but the German censorship permitted little original writing to be published. Within the restrictions, Les Chroniques de Jersey, the only surviving French language newspaper in the Islands, republished considerable quantities of older Jèrriais literature for purposes of morale and the assertion of identity. The post-Liberation social changes meant, however, that vernacular literature has never regained the situation it had enjoyed previously.

Sorley MacLean's work in Scottish Gaelic in the 1930s gave new value to modern literature in that language.

Highly anglicised Lowland Scots is often used in contemporary Scottish fiction, for example, the Edinburgh dialect of Lowland Scots in Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. Edwin Morgan is the current Makar (Scottish national poet) and also produces translations of world literature.

Translations are an important feature of the literatures of the regional languages of the islands, for example: Contoyryssyn Ealish ayns Cheer ny Yindyssyn a Manx translation of Alice in Wonderland by Brian Stowell, published in 1990, or the 2004 Scots version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Rab Wilson. Alexander Hutchison has translated the poetry of Catullus into Scots, and in the 1980s Liz Lochhead produced a Scots translation of Tartuffe by Molière. Original literature continues to be promoted by organisations and institutions such as the Eisteddfod or the Mod.

With the revival of Cornish there have been newer works written in the language. The bard Pol Hodge is an example of a poet writing in Cornish.

• Modern literature in Irish

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Literary prizes

Main article: List of British literary awards

Recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature from the isles include Rudyard Kipling (1907), George Bernard Shaw (1925), John Galsworthy (1932), T. S. Eliot (1948), Bertrand Russell (1950), Winston Churchill (1953), William Golding (1983), Seamus Heaney (1995), V. S. Naipaul (2001), Harold Pinter (2005) and Doris Lessing (2007).

Literary prizes for which writers from the United Kingdom are eligible include:

• Man Booker Prize
• Commonwealth Writers' Prize
• International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
• Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Awards)
• Orange Prize for Fiction
• Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry

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See also

• British poetry
• British Latin Literature
• Cornish literature
• English literature
  • English poetry
  • English drama
  • English novel
  • List of English novelists
• Jèrriais literature
• Manx literature
• Scottish literature
  • List of Scottish writers
  • History of the Scots language
• Literature of Shetland
• Welsh literature
  • Welsh poetry
  • List of Welsh language poets
  • Traditional Welsh poetic metres
• Languages in the United Kingdom

• British Library

• Big Read (BBC 2003 poll)

• List of literary movements

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References