chronological overview of English literature

  • 450

    Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period (450–1066)

    Author: tribus germánicas: los anglos y los sajones.
    Had oral literature. A lot of the prose during this time was a translation of something else or otherwise legal, medical, or religious in nature.
  • 1066

    Middle English Period (1066–1500)

    Writings of Middle English were religious in nature.
    Secular literature began to grow.
    Characters: Chaucer, Thomas Malory, and Robert Henryson.
    Notable works include "Piers Plowman" and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight".
  • 1500

    The Renaissance (1500–1660)

    This period is often subdivided into four parts.
    Elizabethan age (1558-1603)
    The Jacobean Age (1603-1625)
    The Carolina Age (1625-1649)
    The Commonwealth Period (1649-1660).
  • Period: 1558 to

    Elizabethan age (1558-1603)

    Golden age of English drama. Notable figures: Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and William Shakespeare.
  • The Neoclassical Period (1600–1785)

    It is subdivided into ages:
    The Restoration (1660-1700)
    The Age of Augustus (1700-1745)
    The Age of Sensitivity (1745-1785).
  • Period: to

    The Jacobean Age (1603-1625)

    Includes the works of John Donne, Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, John Webster, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and Lady Mary Wroth. Translation of the King James Bible.
  • Period: to

    The Carolina Age (1625-1649)

    Notable figures: Carlos I ("Carolus"). John Milton, Robert Burton and George Herbert.
  • Period: to

    The Commonwealth Period (1649-1660)

    Period between the end of the English Civil War and the restoration of the Stuar monarchy.
    Public theaters were closed (for almost two decades)
    Political writings of John Milton and Thomas Hobbes.
    Prose writers such as Thomas Fuller, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell published prolifically.
  • Period: to

    The Restoration (1660–1700)

    Restoration comedies (fashion comedies) were developed under the talents of playwrights such as William Congreve and John Dryden.
    Satire also became quite popular.
  • Period: to

    The Augustan Age (1700–1745)

    It was the time of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who challenged stereotypically female roles.
  • Period: to

    La Edad de la Sensibilidad (1745-1785)

    It was the time of Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Hester Lynch Thrale, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson.
    Neoclassicism, a critical and literary mode, and the Enlightenment, were defended during this time.
  • The Romantic Period (1785–1832)

    The time period ends with the passage of the Reform Bill and the death of Sir Walter Scott
    Period of British literature.
    Works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley.
  • The Victorian Period (1832–1901)

    The period has been divided into "Early" (1832-1848), "Middle" (1848-1870) and "Late" (1870-1901) periods.
    In two phases, that of the Pre-Raphaelites (1848-1860). and that of Aesthetics and decadence (1880-1901).
    Prose fiction under the auspices of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Samuel Butler.
  • The Edwardian Period (1901–1914)

    refers to the reign of George V (1910-1936).
    Georgian poets, such as Ralph Hodgson, John Masefield, WH Davies, and Rupert Brooke.
    Themes and themes tended to be rural or pastoral in nature, treated delicately and traditionally rather than passionately.
  • The Modern Period (1914–?)

    It is traditionally applied to works written after the start of the First World War.
    The characteristics: bold experimentation with the theme, style, and form, encompassing narrative, verse, and drama.
    Most notable writers: Ames Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, DH Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Graham Greene, EM Forster, and Doris Lessing; poets WB Yeats
  • The Postmodern Period (1945–?)

    Starts roughly at the time WWII ended
    Some notable writers of the period include Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Penelope M. Lively, and Iain Banks.