Welcome - ENG 241 - British Literature I - Research Guides at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College

British Literature

English 241 investigates British Literature from its origins until 1750. This span includes the following periods:

Old English Period (450-1066) - One of the most well-known eighth century Old English pieces of literature is Beowulf , a great Germanic epic poem. Two poets of the Old English Period who wrote on biblical and religious themes were Caedmon and Cynewulf.
Middle English Period (1066-1500) - The most widely known of these writings are Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur.
The Renaissance (1500-1660) - Some important writers of the age include William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Ben Jonson.
The Neoclassical (1660-1785) - Some important writers of the age include John Milton, John Dryden, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Daniel Defoe.

Useful Databases

Arts & Humanities Database
This database features hundreds of titles covering Art, Architecture, Design, History, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Theatre and Cultural Studies.
English Poetry
Find poems written from 600 to 1900 including Thomas Percy, Walter Scott, Robert Dodsley, Francis Turner Palgrave, and more.
JSTOR Essential
JSTOR is a digital library for the intellectually curious. JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. The collections in JSTOR include peer-reviewed scholarly journals, respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports, and primary sources from libraries’ special collections and archives.
Learning Literature
Full-text works of poetry, prose and drama, and secondary sources such as author biographies, literary criticisms, essays, reviews and interviews.
Literature Resource Center
Articles, critical essays, work and topic overviews, full-text works, and biographies covering authors, their works, and literary movements.
Poetry for Students
Features discussion and analysis of poems of all time periods, nations, and cultures. Provides an overview of the poem and discussion of its principal themes, images, form and construction.
ProQuest Central
This database serves as the central resource for researchers at all levels. Covering more than 160 subjects areas, ProQuest Central is the largest aggregated database of periodical content. This award-winning online reference resource features a highly-respected, diversified mix of content including scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, books, newspapers, reports and videos.
Twentieth-Century English Poetry
Modernist poems (1900-1999): W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, D.H. Lawrence, Carol Ann Duffy, and more.

Salem Press ebooks for Literature - Critical Approaches

Critical Approaches to Literature - Feminist by Robert C. Evans (Editor)
Call Number: Rowan-Cabarrus North Campus Circulating books PN 56 .F46 C75 2018

ISBN: 9781682175774

Publication Date: 2018-01-16

The Critical Approaches series focuses on one type of literary criticism commonly studied in introductory literature classes. It defines the approach, introduces its genesis, and provides an overview of the leading practitioners within this area of scholarship. Essays then model the approach for students by examining a variety of works--novels, plays, films, and poems.
Critical Approaches to Literature: Moral by Robert C. Evans (Editor)
Call Number: General Collection, PN 49 .C75 2017, Rowan-Cabarrus North Campus

ISBN: 9781682172742

Publication Date: 2017-04-26

The Critical Approaches series focuses on one type of literary criticism commonly studied in introductory literature classes. It defines the approach, introduces its genesis, and provides an overview of the leading practitioners within this area of scholarship. Essays then model the approach for students by examining a variety of works--novels, plays, films, and poems.
Critical Approaches to Literature: Multicultural by Robert C. Evans (Editor)
Call Number: General Collection, PN 56 .M8 C75 2017, Rowan-Cabarrus North Campus

ISBN: 9781682175750

Publication Date: 2017-07-21

The Critical Approaches series focuses on one type of literary criticism commonly studied in introductory literature classes. It defines the approach, introduces its genesis, and provides an overview of the leading practitioners within this area of scholarship.
Critical Approaches to Literature - Psychological by Robert C. Evans (Editor)
Call Number: General Collection, PN 56 .C75 2017, Rowan-Cabarrus North Campus

ISBN: 9781682172728

Publication Date: 2017-03-27

The Critical Approaches series focuses on one type of literary criticism commonly studied in introductory literature classes. It defines the approach, introduces its genesis, and provides an overview of the leading practitioners within this area of scholarship.

Salem Press ebooks for Literature - Critical Insights: Themes

Critical Insights: Civil Rights Literature by Christopher A. Varlack (Editor)
ISBN: 9781682172681

Publication Date: 2017-02-22

American civil rights literature has largely been associated with speeches, letters, and non-fiction works produced by African-American activists of the 1950s and 60s such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
Critical Insights: Historical Fiction by Salem Press Editors; Virginia Brackett (Editor)
ISBN: 9781682177105

Publication Date: 2018-01-30

This volume encourages readers to engage with plots based on historical events and characters in several ways. They may re-imagine history in cases where it is reconstructed; become better acquainted with history as it is personalized through specific characters; and, perhaps most importantly, even question history.
Critical Insights: Holocaust Literature by Dorian Stuber (Editor)
ISBN: 9781619255272

Publication Date: 2016-10-27

From 1941 to 1945, the regime of Nazi Germany committed mass genocide against six million Jewish people in Europe, as well as five million Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled citizens, communists, and more.
Critical Insights: The Immigrant Experience by Salem Press Editors; Maryse Jayasuriya (Editor)
ISBN: 9781682176924

Publication Date: 2018-03-21

This collection focuses on the variety of immigrant experiences that have been depicted in literary works and the techniques that immigrant writers have used in fiction and non-fiction.
Critical Insights: Paranoia, Alienations and Fear by Kimberly Drake (Editor)
ISBN: 9781682171264

Publication Date: 2016-12-30

Fear, paranoia, and alienation are terms that pull in different directions, but they also overlap in key ways, most having to do with the idea that the mind's apprehension of danger, whether that apprehension is accurate or not, can lead to expected emotions.
Critical Insights: Rebellion by Salem Press Editors (Editor); Robert C. Evans (Editor)
ISBN: 9781682175576

Publication Date: 2017-11-30

This volume will explore the history, themes, styles, and forms of Rebellion in literature. It will focus on defining works, especially from British and American writers such as Melville, Dickinson, Shelley, and Amis. Authors represented will be diverse in gender and ethnicity as well as in their economic, spiritual, and political orientations.
Critical Insights: Social Justice and American Literature by Salem Press Editors; Jeff Birkenstein (Editor)
ISBN: 9781682175651

Publication Date: 2017-11-30

Social Justice and American Literature will examine the work of Richard Wright, Amy Lowell, Philip Roth, Kate Chopin and James Baldwin among others. Themes that will be dealt with are: gender and feminism; gay writers; Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic/Border writers; Appalachian and socio-economic justice.
Critical Insights: Southwestern Literature by William Brandon (Editor)
ISBN: 9781619258426

Publication Date: 2016-01-20

Novels of the American Southwest most often deal with battles between man and the desert landscape, quests of Manifest Destiny, tales of the Old West, and cross-cultural conflicts between white American settlers and Native American tribes, including the Navajo and Apache. This volume explores these and many other themes, found in the works of such authors as Willa Cather, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, and more.
Critical Insights: The Woman Warrior by Linda Trinh Moser (Editor)
Call Number: General Collection, HU 56 .T24 2016, Rowan-Cabarrus North Campus

ISBN: 9781682173947

Publication Date: 2016-11-04

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is, according to the Modern Language Association, the most taught text on U.S. campuses, featured in Literature, Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, Women's Studies, and Anthropology, as well as other departments.

Links to other Guides

ENG 131 - Introduction to Literature
by Laurie Robb Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 45 views this year
ENG 231 - American Literature I
by Laurie Robb Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 1498 views this year
ENG 232 - American Literature II
by Laurie Robb Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 559 views this year
ENG 241 - British Literature I
by Laurie Robb Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 397 views this year
ENG 242 - British Literature II
by Laurie Robb Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 217 views this year

Shakespeare and the Renaissance
by Laurie Robb Last Updated Sep 22, 2025 1696 views this year

Old English Translators

Old English, sometimes known as Anglo Saxon, is a precursor of the Modern English language. It was spoken between the 5th and 12th century in areas of what is now England and Southern Scotland.

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Salem Literature

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