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This period includes all the works that were available in Europe during the Middle Ages (from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, 500 AD to the Renaissance of the 15th century). The literature of this era was dominated by religious writings, which included poetry, theology and the lives of the saints, but secular works and scientific works were also produced.
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Venerable Bede, in his monastery in Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
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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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Anselmo includes in his Proslogion his famous "ontological proof" of the existence of God
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A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem by Piers Plowman.
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Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary romance in ancient Troy.
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Thomas Malory, en la cárcel en algún lugar de Inglaterra, compila Morte d'Arthur , un relato en inglés de los cuentos franceses del rey Arturo
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"The English Renaissance" is the term used to describe the artistic and cultural movement that existed in England from the sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth.
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Erasmus and Thomas More take the Northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
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The first version of the English prayer book, or Common Prayer Book, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer.
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Samuel Sewall begins a diary of daily life in Boston, Massachusetts, which will span a period of more than fifty years..
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Marlowe's first work, Tamburlaine the Great, presents the shocking blank verse of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
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The central character of Shakespeare in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disappointment of a less confident era
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William Bradford begins a journal of the experience of the pilgrims in New England, published later (in 1856) as History of Plymouth Plantation.
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John Locke publishes his Essay on Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience
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The epoch of the early eighteenth century is known as the Augustan era or neoclassical literature. The works of Alexander Pope demonstrate that the poetry of these years was very formal. In the middle of the XVIII the novel was based on the hand of authors like Henry Fielding, Laurence Stern and Samuel Richardson, who perfected the epistolary novel; Richardson was a moralist while Fielding and Stern came closer to the comic genre.
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The Age of Augustus begins in English literature, claiming comparison with the flowering equivalent under Augustus Caesar
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Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, with his detailed realism, can be considered as the first English novel
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Clarissa by Samuel Richardson begins the correspondence that becomes the longest novel in the English language
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The English historian Edward Gibbon, sitting among the ruins of Rome, conceives the idea of Decay and Fall of the Roman Empire.
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A Society of Knights in Scotland begins the publication of the immensely successful Encyclopedia Britannica
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The reaction towards industrialization and urbanism pushed the poets to explore nature, as the group of "The poets of the lake". These romantic poets brought to English literature a new degree of sentimentality and introspection.
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The American poet Philip Freneau describes in The British Prison Ship the horrors of his experiences as a prisoner
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Thomas Paine publishes the first part of The Rights of Man, his response to Burke's reflections on the revolution in France.
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Walter Scott publishes The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the long romantic poem that first gives him fame
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Pride and Prejudice, based on a 1797 youth work called First Impressions, is the second Jane Austen novel to be published
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Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus, a Gothic tale about how to give life to an artificial man.
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Walter Scott publishes Ivanhoe, a love story, tournaments and sieges at the time of the Crusades.
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An American poem, A Visit of Saint Nicholas, describes modern Santa Claus in every detail.
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The patriotic anthem of Samuel Francis Smith, United States, is sung for the first time on July 4 in Boston
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The American novelist William Gilmore Simms publishes Guy Rivers, the first of his series known as Border Romances.
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Alexis de Tocqueville publishes in French the first two volumes of his extremely influential study Democracy in America.
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In his Discourse on the School of Divinity, delivered at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson criticizes formal religion and gives priority to personal spiritual experience.
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The English poet Robert Browning publishes a vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge of The Pied Piper of Hamelin
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The most outstanding novelists of the period between wars were D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, this last member of the Bloomsbury group. The Sitwells also gained strength among literary and artistic movements, but with less influence.
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Friedrich Engels, after directing a textile factory in Manchester, publishes The condition of the working class in England.
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Charles Darwin presents the theory of evolution in On the origin of species, the result of a 20-year investigation.
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In his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, the American author William Dean Howells follows the fate of a man made in Boston
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Women and Economics, developing the feminist theme in the political and cultural life of the United States.
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The first novel of Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, does not receive publicity because its editor, Frank Doubleday, considers it immoral
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Two examples of English postmodern literature are: John Fowles and Julian Barnes. Some important writers of the beginning of the 21st century are: Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Will Self, Andrew Motion and Salman Rushdie.
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Tarzan makes his first appearance in the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the monkeys
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Scott FitzGerald publishes his novel The Great Gatsby, set in a contemporary world of generous indulgence sustained by crime.
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The work of Bertolt Brecht The Life of Galileo opens in Los Angeles with Charles Laughton at the head
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Dylan Thomas' 'voice game', Under Milk Wood, is broadcast on the BBC radio, with Richard Burton as the narrator
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The British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher publishes an influential economic tract, Small is Beautiful
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The English novelist Sebastian Faulks publishes Birdsong, set in part in the trenches of the First World War.
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A school magician performs his first tricks on Harry Potter and JK Rowling's Philosopher's Stone
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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials.
