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The term Anglo-Saxon comes from two Germanic tribes: the Angles and the Saxons. This period of literature dates back to their invasion (along with the Jutes) of Celtic England circa 450.
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The Middle English writings were religious in nature; the era extends to around 1500. This period is home to the likes of Chaucer, Thomas Malory, and Robert Henryson. Notable works include "Piers Plowman" and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."
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This period is 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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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, William Shakespeare. -
The Neoclassical period is also subdivided into ages, including The Restoration (1660–1700), The Augustan Age (1700–1745), and The Age of Sensibility (1745–1785).
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The Jacobean Age is named after 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 -
The Caroline Age covers the reign of Charles I (“Carolus”) notable figures: John Milton, Robert Burton, and George Herbert -
The Commonwealth Period was so named for the period between the end of the English Civil War and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. appeared John Milton and Thomas Hobbes’ political writings. -
The Restoration period was in response to the Puritan era, the of dramaturges emerged: William Congreve and John Dryden. Satire by Samuel Butler notable writers: Aphra Behn, John Bunyan, and John Locke. -
The Age of Augustus was the time of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a poet, and Daniel Defoe. -
In the age of sensibility, Samuel Johnson had Ideas such as neoclassicism, a critical and literary mode, and the Enlightenment, novelists of the era: Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne, the poets William Cowper and Thomas Percy. -
The Age of British Literature includes the works of such giants as Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley; (between 1786 and 1800), the Gothic era, prominent writers Matthew Lewis, Anne Radcliffe, and William Beckford.
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"early" (1832-1848), "middle" (1848-1870), and "late" (1870-1901) or in two phases, that of the Pre-Raphaelites (1848-1860) and that of Aestheticism and Decadence (1880-1901 ). -
Poets of this age include Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, among others, in the prose fiction of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Samuel Butler. -
This period is named after the reign of Queen Victoria, beginning in 1837, and ending with her death in 1901.
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Is named for King Edward VII and covers the period between Victoria’s death and the outbreak of World War I. the era includes classic novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Henry James; notable poets such as Alfred Noyes and William Butler Yeats; and dramatists such as James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy.
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It refers to the reign of George V (1910–1936) and the four Georges from 1714–1830, and covers, the Georgian poets, such as Ralph Hodgson, John Masefield, W.H. Davies, and Rupert Brooke. The themes were rural or pastoral in nature.
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Starting after World War I. include subject matter, style, form, narrative, verse, and drama.
Some writers of this period include the novelists James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Doris Lessing; the poets W.B. Yeats. -
The postmodern period begins the time that World War II ended. Poststructuralist literary theory and criticism developed during this time. writers of the period include Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Penelope M. Lively, and Iain Banks.