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The texts were written in Old English.
The most important texts were The seafarer and The wanderer, which are old english poems found in the Book of Exeter and come from an anonymous composer.
Transmission: oral to be able to memorize them, they used resources such as tropes, rhymes, repetitions, etc. -
Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mixes the legends of Scandinavia with the English experience of the Angles and Saxons.
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The Eddas material, which takes shape in Iceland, is derived from earlier sources in Norway, Great Britain, and Burgundy.
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The theater was discovered, a relevant fact for the church.
The church indoctrinated people through dramaturgy. (That is, the church realized that because of Christianity people gathered for the Eucharist, so the church decided to gather from the general to teach representative plays with religious messages.). -
Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later gives the humanists the name Dunsman or dunce.
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William of Ockham advocates reducing arguments to the essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor.
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A storyteller who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins Piers Plowman's epic poem.
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Chaucer begins an ambitious plan for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he is only 24 by the time of his death.
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Iterlude Thomas Heywood.
Ordinary men and women begin to consume literature.
There begins to be authorship. -
Very relevant fact: appearance of the printing press, which facilitates the dissemination of the texts that have culminated in the history of literature.
Texts are as we know them today. -
William Tyndale studies at the University of Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English.
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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, features the chilling blank verse from the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
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Shakespeare: Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disappointment of a less trusting age.
John Smith: John Smith publishes A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of the region in 1614. -
John Milton's Lycidos is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King.
John Locke publishes his Essay on Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience.
Henry Fielding introduces a character of enduring appeal in the scruffy but good-hearted Tom Jones. -
17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who was later hailed as an important poet, commits suicide in a London attic.
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Thomas Paine publishes his full Age of Reason, An Attack on Conventional Christianity.
William Cobbett returns to England the bones of Thomas Paine, who died in the USA in 1809.
London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. -
English author George Eliot gains fame with his first full-length novel, Adam Bede.
French artist and author George du Maurier publishes his novel Trilby. -
Rudyard Kipling publishes Just So Stories for Little Children.
James Joyce's novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, begins serial publication in a London newspaper, The Egoist.
Henry Williamson wins a wide readership with Tarka the Otter, a realistic story of the life and death of an otter in Devon. -
John Maynard Keynes defines his economics in the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
Kingsley Amis and other young writers in Britain are known as Angry Young Men.
British author Roald Dahl publishes a children's novel, James and the Giant Peach. -
Iris Murdoch publishes The Sea, the Sea, and wins the 1978 Booker Prize.
English author Julian Barnes publishes a multifaceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot.
Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Kefalonia.
Michael Frayn's play in Copenhagen dramatizes Werner Heisenberg's visit to Niels Bohr in Denmark during the war.