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Period: 500 BCE to 1066
Old English
• Descended from the language spoken by the North Germanic
• No writing, only runes.
• Learned Latin alphabet from Roman missioners.
• First composed orally.
• Mostly chronicle and poetry - lyric, descriptive but chiefly
narrative or epic.
• Considered a dead language. -
731
Venerable Bede
Venerable Bede, in his monastery in Jarrow, completed his history of the English church and people. -
800
Beowulf
Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mixed the legends of Scandinavia with the English experience of the Angles and Saxons. -
950
Eddas
The material of the Eddas, which took shape in Iceland, is derived from earlier sources in Norway, Great Britain and Burgundy. -
Period: 1066 to 1500
Middle English and Chaucer
• Appeared ideas and themes from French and Celtic
literature.
• Appears Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), introduces the iambic
pentameter line, the rhyming couplet and other rhymes used in
Italian poetry, his greatest work is mostly narrative poetry, like
Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. -
1300
Juan Duns Scotus
Duns Scotus is generally considered be one of the three most important philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages. Next to Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, they knew as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later gave the humanists the name of Dunsman or Dunce. -
1340
William of Ockham
William of Ockham advocates reducied arguments to the essentials, a focus later known as Ockham's Razor. -
1367
William Langland
William Langland is the presumed author of a work of Middle English alliterative verse generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes. The poem translated the language and concepts of the cloister into symbols and images that could be understood by a layman. -
1387
Chaucer
Chaucer started an his ambitious plan for 100 Canterbury Tales, which he only turned 24 by the time of his death. -
Period: 1460 to 1500
Tudor Lyric Poetry
• Modern lyric poetry in English begins in the early 16th
century.
• Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) introduces the sonnet and a
range of short lyrics.
• Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547) develops blank
• Reign of Elizabeth appeared:
• Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) with Astrophil and Stella
• Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) with Faerie Queene
• Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618)
• Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616) with his sonetes. -
Period: 1500 to 1576
Metaphysical Poetry
• Elizabethan era.
• John Donne (1572-1631) lyric poet.
• Movement characterize by the preoccupation with the big
questions of love, death and religious faith.
• George Herbert (1593-1633).
• Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).
• Henry Vaughan (1621-1695).
• Writers called metaphysical poets. -
1524
William Tyndale
William Tyndale studied at the University of Wittenberg and planed to translate the Bible into English. -
Period: 1576 to
Renaissance Drama
• 16th century
• Marlowe used the five act structure and the medium of blank
verse to write his plays: Tamburlaine; Dr. Faustus; Edward II
and The Jew of Malta.
• Shakespeare developed plays using this five act structure and
blank verse.
• John Webster (1580-1625) with The Duchess of Malfi and The
White Devil.
• Develop of Jacobean style, excessively violent.
• Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626) with The Revenger's Tragedy. -
Marlowe
Marlowe's firs, he worked Tamburlaine the Great, presented the shocking blank verse of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. -
William Shakespeare
The central character of Shakespeare in Hamlet expresseed both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusionment of a less trusting era. -
John Smith
John Smith published a description of New England, a review of his exploration of the region in 1614. -
John Milton
Lycidas by John Milton is published in memory of a friend of Cambridge, Edward King. -
Period: to
Epic Poetry
• Developed during the mid 18th century.
• Characterized by the epic poetry, biblical epic, comic parody of
the epic form, mock-heroic,
• John Milton (1608-1674) with Paradise Lost.
• John Dryden (1631-1700)
• Alexander Pope (1688-1744) with The Rape of the Lock
• The neo-classical poet Thomas Gray (1716-1771) with Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard. -
Period: to
Restoration Comedy
• Characterize with the comic drama, dealing with issues of
sexual politics among the wealthy and the bourgeois.
• Developed of plays for a serious examination of
contemporary morality.
• William Wycherley (1640-1716) with The Country Wife. -
John Locke
John Locke publishes his Essay on Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience. -
Period: to
Prose fiction and the novel
Characterized by novelists, with satires in verse and prose, Gulliver's Travels. Daniel Defoe with Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Samuel Richardson Pamela (1740). Henry Fielding (1707-54) Joseph Andrews and Tom
Jones. Laurence Sterne (1713-68),Tristram Shandy. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Jane Austen 1775-1817), with Northanger Abbey.
Novelists characterized with the historical romanticism and the established, urbane classical views. Gothic. Mary Shelley (1797-1851),Frankenstein. -
Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding presented a character of lasting appeal in the scruffy but good-hearted Tom Jones. -
Period: to
Romanticism
Philosophical and literary movement where prevalence the senses or passions against the intellect and of the individual against the consensus. William Blake (1757-1827). The poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) published a volume entitled Lyrical Ballads, in 1798. Robert Burns (1759 1796) writes lyric verse in the dialect of lowland Scots, author of Auld Lang Syne. John Keats (1795-1821). Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Lord Byron (1788-1824). -
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton, 17, who was later hailed as an important poet, commits suicide in a loft in London. -
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine published his complete "Age of Reason", an attack on conventional Christianity. -
Period: to
Victorian Novel and Poetry
• 19th century
• Presented the interest of the state to bring literature to the masses and educate them.
• Charles Dickens (1812-1870).
• Great novels of the era are Great Expectations, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit.
• Anthony Trollope (1815-82),
• Wilkie Collins (1824-89), with The Moonstone.
• William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) with Vanity Fair.
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).
• Robert Browning (1812-1889).
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). -
William Cobbett
William Cobbett returned to England the bones of Thomas Paine, who died in the USA. UU In 1809. -
Period: to
Early Modern Writers
Henry James (1843-1916). Pole Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), The Portrait of a Lady, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The Secret Agent. R.L. Stevenson (1850-94),Kidnappe, Treasure Island, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900),The Importance of Being Earnest, and The Portrait of Dorian Gray. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). H.G. Wells (1866-1946), The History of Mr. Polly. E.M. Forster (1879-1970), Pygmalion, Howard's End, A Room with a View and A Passage to India. -
Peter Mark Roget
The London doctor Peter Mark Roget, they published his thesaurus. Thesaurus of words and phrases in English. -
George Eliot
The English author George Eliot gains fame with his first full-length novel, Adam Bede. -
Period: to
Early 20th Century Poets.
• I World War
• W.B. (William Butler) Yeats (1865-1939)
• T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965), with The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943).
• Thomas Hardy
• Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936),
• A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
• Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
• Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
• Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
• Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
• Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918). -
George du Maurier
The French artist and author George du Maurier, they published their novel Trilby. -
Period: to
Poetry in the later 20th century
• Period between the two great wars.
• Revival of romanticism in poetry.
• W.H. (Wystan Hugh).
• Auden (1907-73).
• Louis MacNeice (1907-63).
• Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72).
• Seamus Heaney (b. 1939).
• Dylan Thomas (1914-53).
• Seamus Heaney (b. 1939). -
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Public Kipling Just So Stories for Little Children. -
James Joyce
James Joyce's novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, began a serial publication in a London newspaper, The Egoist. -
Henry Williamson
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
John Maynard Keynes defined his economy in the General Theory of employment, interests and money. -
Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis and other young wrote in Britain. They are known as Angry Young Men. -
Roald Dahl
British author Roald Dahl published a children's novel, James and the Giant Peach. -
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch published: The Sea, the Sea, and won the 1978 Booker Prize. -
Julian Barnes
English author Julian Barnes published a multifaceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot. -
Louis de Berniéres
Louis de Bernières published Mandolin of Captain Corelli, a love story set in the Kefalonia occupied by the Italians. -
Michael Frayn
The work of Michael Frayn in Copenhagen, was dramatized the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in Denmark during the war.
