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Anglo-Saxon England lasted from the end of the Roman period of Britain and the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 5th century, until the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes who settled in southern Britain. Their descendants and the indigenous people adopted the Anglo-Saxon language and culture during the 5th and 6th centuries. Their language, now called Old English. -
In the 5th century, Germanic tribes entered Britain from the east and south coasts. The Germanic tribes spoke similar languages. On the island, from their speeches or dialects, a common language was formed, which is what we now call Old English.
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The Venerable Bede,his ecumenical writings were extensive and included a number of biblical commentaries and other theological works of exegetical scholarship,at his monastery in Jarrow,completes his history of the church and the English people. -
Beowulf is an anonymous Anglo-Saxon epic poem written in Old English in alliterative verse. The first great work of Germanic literature, it blends the legends of Scandinavia with the English experience of the Angles and Saxons in England. -
A lot of the prose during this time was a translation of something else or otherwise legal, medical, or religious in nature; however, some works, such as Beowulf and those by period poets Caedmon and Cynewulf, are important. -
They are fragmentary parts of an ancient oral storytelling tradition (now lost) that was collected and written down by scholars who preserved a part of these stories. The material of the Eddas, which takes shape in Iceland, is derived from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy. -
In 1066, Britain was invaded by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy (now part of France). The Norman invaders brought with them French, which became the language of the royal court as well as of the ruling and commercial estates. -
The Middle English period sees a huge transition in the language, culture, and lifestyle of England and results in what we can recognize today as a form of “modern” (recognizable) English. The era extends to around 1500. As with the Old English period, much of the Middle English writings were religious in nature; however, from about 1350 onward, secular literature began to rise.
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John Duns Scotus joined the community of Franciscan friars in Dumfries in 1279. He completed Philosophy and Letters in 1288 and studied Theology at Oxford.In magisterial exercise he used as text Sententiae of Peter Lombard, work that was the most important manual of dogmatics of the time. He wrote notes on this book. As a theologian, he defended the humanity of Christ and prepared the theological basis for the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. -
William Langland is the supposed author of the first known work of Piers Plowman, whose English translation was Peter the Labrador. Born about 1332 in Ledbury, near the Welsh marshes, and died in 1400, he seems to have been invested with minor orders although he never became a priest. -
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English writer, philosopher, diplomat and poet, best known as the author of the Canterbury Tales. He is considered the most important English poet of the Middle Ages and the first to be buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. -
Thomas Malory was the author or compiler of The Death of Arthur. There are several hypotheses about Malory's identity, although the most widely accepted says that he is an Englishman from Newbold Revell in Warwickshire. The surname Malory appears with different spellings, including Maillorie, Mallory and Maleore. -
Robert Henryson was a Scottish poet of whose personal life almost nothing is known. He may have taught at Dunfermline Abbey, and may have been connected with the University of Glasgow. -
Recently, critics and literary historians have begun to call this the “Early Modern” period, but here we retain the historically familiar term “Renaissance.” This period is often subdivided into four parts, including the Elizabethan Age (1558–1603), the Jacobean Age (1603–1625), the Caroline Age (1625–1649), and the Commonwealth Period (1649–1660).
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Edmund Spenser was an English poet, author of the famous work The Faerie Queene, an epic poem with a fantastic allegory that paid homage to the House of Tudor and Elizabeth I of England. -
Walter Raleigh was an English sailor, privateer, writer, courtier and politician, who popularized tobacco in Europe. He was the youngest son of Walter Raleigh and his third wife, Katherine Champernowne. In classical Spanish literature he was known as Guatarral or Guantarral.
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The Elizabethan Age was the golden age of English drama. Some of its noteworthy figures include Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, of course, William Shakespeare.
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Francis Bacon, 1st Baron Verulamium, 1st Viscount St. Albans and Chancellor of England was a celebrated English philosopher, politician, lawyer and writer, father of philosophical and scientific empiricism. -
Michael Drayton was an English poet and playwright who was prominent in the Elizabethan era. -
Christopher Marlowe was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan Period. He popularized blank verse by incorporating it into his theater. He is considered the great predecessor of Shakespeare; in fact, there is debate about his authorship of several of the Bard's plays. -
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. Sometimes known as the Bard of Avon, Shakespeare is considered the most important writer in the English language and one of the most celebrated writers in world literature. -
John Donne was the most important English metaphysical poet of the times of Queen Elizabeth I, King James I and his son Charles I. The metaphysical poetry is more or less the equivalent of the Conceptionist poetry of the Spanish Golden Age of which it is a contemporary -
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance playwright, poet and actor. His best known plays are Volpone in addition to his lyric poems. Jonson read widely and had a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy. -
Robert Burton was an English clergyman and scholar, professor at Oxford University, who has gone down in posterity for his long essay The Anatomy of Melancholy, considered a major work of British literature. -
John Webster was an English playwright of the age of James I, one of the leading dramatists of his time -
Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess of Falkland, was an English poet, playwright, translator and historian. She is the first known woman to have written and published an original play in English. From an early age, contemporary writers recognized her as an accomplished scholar. -
Lady Mary Wroth was an English Renaissance poet. A member of a distinguished literary family, Lady Wroth was one of the first English women writers to achieve an enduring reputation. Mary Wroth was the niece of Mary Sidney, and Sir Philip Sidney, a famous Elizabethan poet-courtier -
George Herbert was an English poet, orator and priest. His literary work, written over 40 years, has gained recognition over the centuries. The poems of his last years, written as a clergyman in Benerton, near Salisbury, are considered extraordinary. -
The Jacobean Age is named for the reign of James I. It includes the works of John Donne, Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, John Webster, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and Lady Mary Wroth. The King James translation of the Bible also appeared during the Jacobean Age.
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John Milton was an English poet and essayist, known especially for his epic poem Paradise Lost. Politically he was an important figure among those who supported the Commonwealth of England. -
Thomas Fuller, was a historian and member of the Church of England, who rose to the position of chaplain to the King of England -
Andrew Marvell was a British poet, satirist and parliamentarian. He was little recognized as a poet in his time, but achieved his popularity as a satirist, as well as a patriot. Friend and assistant of a renowned author, John Milton, and admirer of the politician Oliver Cromwell. -
The Caroline Age covers the reign of Charles I (“Carolus”). John Milton, Robert Burton, and George Herbert are some of the notable figures.
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the Commonwealth Period was so named for the period between the end of the English Civil War and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. This is the time when Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, led Parliament, who ruled the nation. At this time, public theaters were closed (for nearly two decades) to prevent public assembly and to combat moral and religious transgressions
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William Wordsworth was one of the most important English Romantic poets. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he contributed to the beginning of the Romantic era in English literature with their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. This work had a decisive influence on the literary landscape of the 19th century. -
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, critic and philosopher, who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of Romanticism in England and one of the Lakists. His best known works are possibly Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his prose work Biographia Literaria. -
The beginning date for the Romantic period is often debated. Some claim it is 1785, immediately following the Age of Sensibility. Others say it began in 1789 with the start of the French Revolution, and still others believe that 1798, the publication year for William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s book Lyrical Ballads is its true beginning.
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George Gordon Byron, known as Lord Byron, was a poet of the British Romanticism movement, considered by some to be one of the greatest poets in the English language and forerunner of the figure of the accursed poet. -
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a Victorian-era writer noted for her poetry. She campaigned for the abolition of slavery and her work helped influence the reform of child labor legislation. Her literary production influenced authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. -
Alfred Tennyson, I Baron Tennyson, was an English poet and playwright, one of the most illustrious of world literature, belonging to post-Romanticism. Most of his work is inspired by mythological and medieval themes, and is characterized by its musicality and the psychological depth of his portraits. -
Christina Georgina Rossetti was a British poet, one of the most important in the nineteenth century in her country. -
This period is named for the reign of Queen Victoria, who ascended to the throne in 1837, and it lasts until her death in 1901. It was a time of great social, religious, intellectual, and economic issues, heralded by the passage of the Reform Bill, which expanded voting rights. The period has often been divided into “Early” (1832–1848), “Mid” (1848–1870) and “Late” (1870–1901) periods or into two phases, that of the Pre-Raphaelites (1848–1860) and that of Aestheticism and Decadence (1880–1901).
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Henry James was an American writer and literary critic, naturalized British, recognized as a key figure in the transition from realism to Anglo-Saxon modernism, whose novels and short stories -
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad, was a Polish novelist who adopted English as his literary language. Conrad, whose work explores human vulnerability and moral instability, is considered one of the greatest novelists of English literature. -
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was a British writer and poet. He is the author of short stories, children's stories, novels and poetry. -
Ralph Hodgson, Order of the Rising Sun, was an English poet, very popular in his lifetime on the strength of a small number of anthology pieces, such as The Bull. He was one of the most 'pastoral' of the Georgian poets. In 1954, he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. -
Sir Edward Howard Marsh was a British political scientist, translator, patron of the arts and civil servant. He was the patron of the Georgian school of poets and friend of many poets, including Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon -
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist and publisher. His real name was Ford Hermann Hueffer, but he changed it, first to Ford Madox Hueffer, and then to Ford Madox Ford, in homage to his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, of whom he wrote a biography. -
Dorothy Richardson, British novelist, poet and journalist -
John Edward Masefield was an English poet. He was a sailor in his youth, then lived precariously for several years in the United States before settling in London. -
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish writer, world-renowned as one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century, acclaimed for his masterpiece, Ulysses, and for his controversial later novel, Finnegans Wake. -
Adeline Virginia Stephen, better known as Virginia Woolf, was a British writer, author of novels, short stories, plays and other literary works; considered one of the most prominent figures of the Anglo-Saxon avant-garde modernism of the twentieth century and international feminism. -
Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic sonnets about war, written during World War I; however, he never experienced combat first hand -
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was a British poet and soldier. His mentor, Siegfried Sassoon, was a clear influence on his shocking and raw poetry about the horrors of World War I, which contrasted with the general perception of the war. -
was a British writer and philosopher who emigrated to the United States. A member of a well-known family of intellectuals, he is best known for his novels and essays, but he also published short stories, poetry, travel books and screenplays. -
This period is named for King Edward VII and covers the period between Victoria’s death and the outbreak of World War I. Although a short period (and a short reign for Edward VII), the era includes incredible classic novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Henry James (who was born in America but spent most of his writing career in England); notable poets such as Alfred Noyes and William Butler Yeats
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Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish playwright, novelist, critic and poet, one of the most important representatives of 20th century literary experimentalism, within Anglo-Saxon modernism. -
The Georgian period usually refers to the reign of George V (1910–1936) but sometimes also includes the reigns of the four successive Georges from 1714–1830. Here, we refer to the former description as it applies chronologically and covers, for example, the Georgian poets, such as Ralph Hodgson, John Masefield, W.H. Davies, and Rupert Brooke.
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Dylan Marlais Thomas was a British poet, short story writer and playwright, famous for being a bohemian and also famous for his captivating voice, which attracted hundreds of people to his poetry recitals, or to the receiver when he spoke at the BBC. -
The modern period traditionally applies to works written after the start of World War I. Common features include bold experimentation with subject matter, style, and form “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” are often referred to when describing the core tenet or “feeling” of modernist concerns.
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John Anthony Burgess Wilson was an English writer and composer, who produced a prolific literary and musical oeuvre, being generally known for the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, which was made famous by Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film of the same name. -
Joseph Heller was an American novelist -
John Robert Fowles, known as John Fowles was a British novelist and essayist. -
The postmodern period begins about the time that World War II ended. Many believe it is a direct response to modernism. Some say the period ended about 1990, but it is likely too soon to declare this period closed. Poststructuralist literary theory and criticism developed during this time. Some notable writers of the period include Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Penelope M. Lively, and Iain Banks. Many postmodern authors wrote during the modern period as well.
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