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The culture of the United Kingdom is rich and varied, and has been influential on culture on a worldwide scale. It is a European state, and has many cultural links with its former colonies, particularly those that use the English language.

 

The Arts

Literature

The earliest existing native literature of the territory of the modern UK was written in the Celtic languages of the isles and dates back to the 6th century.

Anglo-Saxon literature includes Beowulf, a national epic, but literature in Latin predominated among educated elites. After the Norman Conquest Anglo-Norman literature brought continental influences to the isles.

English literature proper developed in the late 14th century, with the rise and spread of the London dialect of Middle English. Geoffrey Chaucer is the first great identifiable individual in English literature: his Canterbury Tales remains a popular 14th-century work which readers still enjoy today.

Following the introduction of the printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, the Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the fields of poetry and drama. From this period, poet and playwright William Shakespeare stands out as the most famous writer in the world.

The English novel became a popular form in the 18th century, with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones.

In the early 19th century, the Romantic period showed a flowering of poetry with such poets as William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Lord Byron. The Victorian period was the golden age of the realistic English novel, represented by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Lord Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Hardy.

World War I gave rise to British war poets and writers such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke who wrote of their expectations of war, and/or their experiences in the trench.

The English novel developed in the 20th century into much greater variety and was greatly enriched by immigrant writers. It remains today the dominant English literary form. Other well-known novelists include Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Mary Shelley, J. R. R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf and J.K. Rowling.

Important poets include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Alexander Pope.

Theatre

The UK also has an old tradition of theatre – it was introduced to the UK from Europe by the Romans.



The reign of Elizabeth I in the late 16th and early 17th century saw a flowering of the drama and all the arts. William Shakespeare wrote around 40 plays that are still performed in theatres across the world to this day. They include tragedies, such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear; comedies, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night; and history plays, such as Henry IV, part 1—2. The Elizabethan age is sometimes nicknamed "the age of Shakespeare" for the amount of influence he held over the era. Other important Elizabethan and 17th-century playwrights include Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster.

Today the West End of London has a large number of theatres, particularly centred around Shaftesbury Avenue. A prolific composer of the 20th century Andrew Lloyd Webber has dominated the West End for a number of years and his musicals have travelled to Broadway in New York and around the world, as well as being turned into films.

The Royal Shakespeare Company operates out of Shakespeare's birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon in England, producing mainly but not exclusively Shakespeare's plays.

 


1.3 Music and Cinema

Composers William Byrd, John Taverner, John Blow, Henry Purcell, Edward Elgar, Arthur Sullivan, William Walton, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett have made major contributions to British music, and are known internationally. Living composers include John Tavener, Harrison Birtwistle, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Oliver Knussen.

Britain also supports a number of major orchestras including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Because of its location and other economic factors, London is one of the most important cities for music in the world: it has several important concert halls and is also home to the Royal Opera House, one of the world's leading opera houses. British traditional music has also been very influential abroad.

The UK was one of the two main countries in the development of rock and roll along with the US, and has provided bands including The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, Queen, Elton John, David Bowie, Iron Maiden, Status Quo, the Sex Pistols, Duran Duran, The Jam, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Oasis, Blur, Radiohead and Coldplay, Massive Attack, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers.

Britain has been at the forefront of developments in film, radio, and television.

Many important films have been produced in Britain over the last century, and a large number of significant actors and film-makers have emerged. Currently the main film production centres are at Shepperton and Pinewood Studios.

Visual art

The English Renaissance, starting in the early 16th century, was a parallel to the Italian Renaissance, but did not develop in exactly the same way. It was mainly concerned with music and literature; in art and architecture the change was not as clearly defined as in the continent. Painters from the continent continued to find work in Britain, and brought the new styles with them, especially the Flemish and Italian Renaissance styles.

As a reaction to abstract expressionism, pop art emerged originally in England at the end of the 1950s.

Notable visual artists from the United Kingdom include John Constable, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake and J.M.W. Turner. In the 20th century, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, and the pop artists Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake were of note.

More recently, the so-called Young British Artists have gained some notoriety, particularly Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

Notable illustrators include Aubrey Beardsley, Roger Hargreaves, and Beatrix Potter.


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 816


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