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This Age started in the fifth century when the Jutes, Angles and Saxons came to England from Germany, defeated the English tribes and started their reign. It ended in 1066 with the Norman Conquest.
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Amounting to 3218 lines, is the first and the greatest surviving work of early Germanic literature. The story tells of fantastic fights against fierce dragons, but it is set in an authentic historical context of Scandinavia in the 6th century. -
Belongs to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter Cathedral, is one of the four most significant verse manuscripts to survive from the Anglo-Saxon period. These four books contain the vast majority of all surviving Old English poetry. -
It is during the Middle English period that we see the eventual disappearance of most of the earlier inflections, and the increasing reliance on alternative means of expression, using word order and prepositional constructions rather than word endings to express meaning relationships.
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He was born into a prosperous merchant family in London. His father John Chaucer (c. 1312–1366), was a vintner (a wine merchant), who had married Agnes Copton (d. 1381), perhaps in the early 1330s. He was also a public servant who worked as a soldier, diplomat, comptroller of customs, justice of the peace, clerk of works and a forest official -
The Canterbury Tales tells the story of a group of 31 pilgrims who meet while travelling from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury. To pass the time on the journey, they decide to each tell two tales to the assembled company on the journey there and the journey home. -
The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages. The Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature and art.
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William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of the English language, and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He transformed European theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through innovation in characterization, plot, language and genre. -
The period is called neoclassical because its writers looked back to the ideals and art forms of classical times, emphasizing even more than their Renaissance predecessors the classical ideals of order and rational control.
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Daniel Defoe is best known as the writer of the novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. During his lifetime he gained fame and notoriety for his poems, political pamphlets, and journalism. -
Robinson Crusoe's journey takes place in the context of 17th-century European imperialism and colonialism, as different countries explored the Americas, establishing colonies and exploiting natives. -
William Wordsworth is known as the master of Romantic Poetry for his literary brilliance, depiction of emotions, personifying human life with nature, and propagation of a way of living that called everyone back to nature. -
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a major poet of the English Romantic period, a literary movement characterized by imagination, passion, and the supernatural. He is also noted for his works on literature, religion, and the organization of society. -
The romantic period is a term applied to the literature of approximately the first third of the nineteenth century. During this time, literature began to move in channels that were not entirely new but were in strong contrast to the standard literary practice of the eighteenth century.
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The poem was so different from all the other works in the collection that readers had difficulty understanding it. Coleridge used archaic spellings and obsolete words, and an often inverted word order, apparently driven by the need to achieve rhymes. -
The period of Queen Victoria's reign until her death in 1901 was marked by sweeping progress and ingenuity. It was the time of the world's first Industrial Revolution, political reform and social change, Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin, a railway boom and the first telephone and telegraph.
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Oliver Twist became a vehicle for social criticism aimed directly at the problem of poverty in 19th-century London. -
The importance of Charles Dickens in English literature remains enormous. His books have never gone out of print, and they are widely read to this day. As the works lend themselves to dramatic interpretation, numerous plays, television programs, and feature films based on them continue to appear. -
The beginning of the Edwardian era marked the end of the longest reign to in British history to that date: that of Queen Victoria. With the advent of a new monarch and a new century, Edwardian writers created protagonists who looked introspectively, and thought critically about the moralism and technological advances of the previous era.
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The Georgian period saw Britain establish itself as an international power at the centre of an expanding empire. And accelerating change from the 1770s onwards made it the world’s first industrialised nation.
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William Butler Yeats, Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. -
In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks.
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Joyce was one of the most revered writers of the 20th century, whose landmark book, Ulysses, is often hailed as one of the finest novels ever written. -
Postmodernism is widely considered to be the movement that has brought about several endings: the ending of metanarratives as collective idealisms, the ending of history as the end of totalitarian systems, the ending of inspiration as the end of literature’s sacredness, the ending of magic as the end of the author’s magic trick, the ending of creation as the end of originality and the ending of the novel as the end of genre purity.
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Modern is a historical period that extends from 1501 to 1945. Contemporary refers to the current period and extends back to include works produced by people who are potentially still alive. As such, it is currently possible to refer to works such as art or literature as far back as 1945 as contemporary.