English Literature, 1880–1920: The "Little Renaissance".

This article explains the founding of the ELT Period, also called the Transition Era, 1880-1920. The many "minor" authors discussed here, whom Samuel Butler referred to as the "hewers of wood and tillers of the soil," played an important role in preparing the ground for Yeats, Eliot, James Joyce and other moderns. The period from 1880 until about 1920 seems like Walter Pater's late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, "a brilliant but in part abortive effort" to revitalize Art and Life, a "little renaissance" but a renaissance nevertheless. The article directs its attention to the energy in quest for newness, a new life in the arts and a new artistic temperament in life, concentrating on two kinds of evidence: that which bears on the language and form of art; that which bears on the content of art. [137 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]