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439 BCE
The old English Period (439-1066)
(731) The venerable Bede, completes his history of the English church and people.
(975-1025) Beowulf. Germanic literature mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Agles and Saxons.
(959) The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway. -
1066
The middle english period (1066-1500)
(1367). A narrator who calls Will Langland begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman.
(1380). Geoffrey Chaucer. His great work was The Canterbury Tales, which is in about 17000 lines.
Richard Rolle. The Form of Perfect Living was his most important work. -
1500
The Renaissance Period (1500-1660)
(1510). Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism.
The Prince, written in 1513, was unavailable in English until 1640, but as early as the 1580s Gabriel Harvey, a friend of the poet Edmund Spenser, can be found enthusiastically hailing its author as the apostle of modern pragmatism.
Sir Philip Sidney. The Defence of Poesie (written c. 1578–83, published 1595). -
The Romantic Period (1785-1832)
William Blake. His great work is An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85).
The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807.
Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles. -
The victorian Period (1832-1901).
Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862), which recounts how a woman is seduced into eating beautiful fruit sold by goblins and how her sister saves her after she sickens.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), an entire novel written in verse.
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842), in which the Duke of Ferrara describes how he (probably) killed his last wife to the man who is arranging his next marriage, is one of the most famous examples of a dramatic monologue. -
The Edwardian Period (1901-1914)
‘A Room with a View’ (1908) by E.M. Forster are clearly influenced by the emphasis on the individual and the power of nature presented in Romantic.
(1910). Lucy Maud Montgomery's first novel, Annel of Green Gabels, brings her instant fame and fortune.
H.G. Wells’ ‘The War in the Air’ (1907) is strongly on the John Stuart Mill side of the argument. -
The Georgian Period (1914-1936).
(1915). Rupert Brooke's 1914 and other poems is published a few months after his death in Greece.
(1925). Virginia Woolf publishes her novel Mrs Dalloway, in which the action is limited to a single day.
(1928). Irish author Frank Harris publishes the fourth and final volume of my live and loves. -
The Modern Period (1936-1950).
David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) – Sons and Lovers. he has portrayed the consistent conflict between strong-willed, up-climbing mother and coarse, energetic, earthy but often drunken father. James Joyce. Finnegans Wake (1939). is a complex novel that blends the reality of life with a dream world.
(1945). In George Orweil's fable Animal Farm a ruthless pig. Napoleon, controls the farmyard using the techniques of stalin. -
The postmodern period (1950-2000)
In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism.
In 1971, the Arab-American scholar Ihab Hassan published The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature.
In 1997. A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone. -
The contemporary Period (2000-Present)
Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001). which focuses on a family of five whose members endure unsuccessful marriages, strained familial relationships, and failed careers.
Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad (2016)