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Period: 450 to 1066
Anglo-Saxon Period
The so-called "Dark Ages". Occurred after Rome fell and barbarian tribes moved into Europe. -
Period: 1066 to 1500
Middle english Period
is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe. -
Period: 1500 to
Renaissance
Period regarded as the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Some writers are; William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Nicholas Machiavelli. -
Period: 1558 to
i. Elizabeth Age
England resisted both Spanish invasion and internal squabbles at home. Writers Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, and Sidney. -
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(ii) Jabean Age
Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. -
Period: to
iii. Caroline Age
John Milton, George Herbert, Robert Herrick. -
Period: to
The Enlightenment (Neoclassical) Period
"Neoclassical" refers to the increased influence of Classical literature upon these centuries. The Neoclassical Period is also called the "Enlightenment" due to the increased reverence for logic and disdain for superstition. The period is marked by the rise of Deism, intellectual backlash against earlier Puritanism, and America's revolution against England. -
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Romantic Period
Was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe and its a reaction to the Enlightment. Some writers were; Edgar Alan Poe, Marry Shelley, Victor Hugo. -
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Victorian Period
include sentimental novels. British writers include Elizabeth Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and the Brontë sisters. Pre-Raphaelites, like the Rossetti siblings and William Morris, idealize and long for the morality of the medieval world.
The end of the Victorian Period is marked by the intellectual movements of Aestheticism and "the Decadence" in the writings of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. -
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Modern Age
In Britain, modernist writers include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Wilfred Owen. In America, the modernist period includes Robert Frost and Flannery O'Connor as well as the famous writers of The Lost Generation, such as Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.
The Harlem Renaissance marks the rise of black writers such as Baldwin and Ellison. Realism is the dominant fashion, but the disillusionment with the World Wars lead to new experimentation. -
Period: to
Post Modern Age
T. S. Eliot, Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard, Fowles, Calvino, Ginsberg, Pynchon, etc, and playwrights experimented with metafiction and fragmented poetry. Multiculturalism led to an increasing canonization of non-Caucasian writers such as Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neal Hurston.
Magic Realists such as Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Günter Grass, and Salman Rushdie flourished with surrealistic writings embroidered in the conventions of realism.