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Period: 450 to Jan 1, 1066
Old English
When the jutes, angles and Saxons arrived to England from Germany, defeated the English tribes and started their reign. It ended in 1066 with the Norman conquest. -
731
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The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people -
800
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Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons
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Period: 1066 to 1500
Middle English
It is a time of transition between two eras that each have stronger definition: Old English and Modern English. Before this period we encounter a language which is chiefly Old Germanic in its character – in its sounds, spellings, grammar and vocabulary. After this period we have a language which displays a very different kind of structure, with major changes having taken place in each of these areas, many deriving from the influence of French following the Norman Conquest of 1066. -
1300
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Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce -
1340
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William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor -
1367
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A narrator who calls himself Will, and whose name may be Langland, begins the epic poem of Piers Plowman -
1367
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One of four new yeomen of the chamber in Edward III's household is Geoffrey Chaucer -
1375
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The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur -
1387
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Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death -
Period: 1500 to
English renaissance
The “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of Shakespeare” after the most important monarch and most famous writer of the period. The additions to English vocabulary during this period were deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion or influx of new nationalities or any top-down decrees -
1510
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Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism -
1524
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William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English -
1564
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Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months -
1567
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The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588 -
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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great, introduces the swaggering blank verse of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama -
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After tentative beginnings in the three parts of Henry VI, Shakespeare achieves his first masterpiece on stage with Richard III -
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James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years
William Shakespeare's name appears among the actors in a list of the King's Men -
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Shakespeare's sonnets, written ten years previously, are published -
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Shakespeare's last completed play, The Tempest, is performed -
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John Smith publishes A Description of New England, an account of his exploration of the region in 1614 -
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William Shakespeare dies at New Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church -
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John Heminge and Henry Condell publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First Folio -
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George Herbert's only volume of poems, The Temple, is published posthumously -
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The poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet are published in London under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America -
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Devoted fisherman Izaak Walton publishes the classic work on the subject, The Compleat Angler -
Period: to
Puritan
Puritanism was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincident with the founding of New England; It was also a way of being in the world, a style of response to lived experience- that was reverberated through American life ever since. While the Puritan literature speaks of age of sadness, gloom and pessimism, the Elizabethan literature throbbed with youth, vitality and hope. The Elizabeth literature was intensely romantic. -
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On the first day of the new year Samuel Pepys gets up late, eats the remains of the turkey and begins his diary -
Period: to
Restoration age
The name 'restoration' comes from the crowning of Charles II, which marks the restoring of the traditional English monarchical form of government following a short period of rule by a handful of republican governments.
The writings of this time are both innovative and varied; the style and subject matter of the literature produced during the Restoration period spanned the spectrum from definitively religious to satirical and risqué. -
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Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10 -
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Samuel Pepys ends his diary, after only writing it for nine years -
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Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress, written during John Bunyan's two spells in Bedford Gaol, is published and is immediately popular -
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Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade -
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John Locke publishes his Essay concerning Human Understanding, arguing that all knowledge is based on experience -
Period: to
18th century
The 18th century in Europe was The Age of Enlightenment and literature explored themes of social upheaval, reversals of personal status, political satire, geographical exploration and the comparison between the supposed natural state of man and the supposed civilized state of man -
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The Augustan Age begins in English literature, claiming comparison with the equivalent flowering under Augustus Caesar -
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The Tatler launches a new style of journalism in Britain's coffee houses, followed two years later by the Spectator -
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25-year-old George Berkeley attacks Locke in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge -
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Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock introduces a delicate vein of mock-heroic in English poetry -
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Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel -
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Jonathan Swift sends his hero on a series of bitterly satirical travels in Gulliver's Travels -
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David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science -
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Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language -
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Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language -
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Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, beginning with the scene at the hero's conception -
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English historian Edward Gibbon, sitting among ruins in Rome, conceives the idea of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -
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A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland begins publication of the immensely successful Encyclopaedia Britannica -
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17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, later hailed as a significant poet, commits suicide in a London garret -
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English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -
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William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself -
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Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with witches -
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English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes a passionately feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -
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William Blake's volume Songs of Innocence and Experience includes his poem 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright' -
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Thomas Paine publishes his completed Age of Reason, an attack on conventional Christianity -
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English poets Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly publish Lyrical Ballads, a milestone in the Romantic movement -
Period: to
Romanticism
Romantic Movement dates its origin in 1798 A.D. with the publication of Lyrical Ballads. Lyrical Ballads is a Magna-Carta (big constitution) of the Romantic Movement. This movement in literature was preceded and accompanied by the change from monarchy to democracy in politics, from materialism to idealism in philosophy, from conservation (old style) to radicalism (revolutionary) in culture and from orthodoxy to emancipation in religion -
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William Blake includes his poem 'Jerusalem' in the Preface to his book Milton -
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Walter Scott publishes The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the long romantic poem that first brings him fame -
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Walter Scott's poem Lady of the Lake brings tourists in unprecedented numbers to Scotland's Loch Katrine -
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Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from Oxford university for circulating a pamphlet with the title The Necessity of Atheism -
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The first two cantos are published of Byron's largely autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, bringing him immediate fame -
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Pride and Prejudice, based on a youthful work of 1797 called First Impressions, is the second of Jane Austen's novels to be published -
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Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias -
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Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a Gothic tale about giving life to an artificial man -
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Byron begins publication in parts of his longest poem, Don Juan an epic satirical comment on contemporary life -
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English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden -
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English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes Ode to the West Wind, written mainly in a wood near Florence -
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English author Thomas De Quincey publishes his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater -
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English author William Hazlitt publishes Table Talk, a two-volume collection that includes most of his best-known essays -
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12-year-old Charles Dickens works in London in Warren's boot-blacking factory -
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English author Frances Trollope ruffles transatlantic feathers with her Domestic Manners of the Americans, based on a 3-year stay -
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24-year-old Charles Dickens begins monthly publication of his first work of fiction, Pickwick Papers (published in book form in 1837) -
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Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838 -
Period: to
Victorian
A fusion of romantic and realist style of writing. Though the Victorian Age produced two great poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, the age is also remarkable for the excellence of its prose -
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English poet Robert Browning publishes a vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge of The Pied Piper of Hamelin
English author Thomas Babington Macaulay publishes a collection of stirring ballads, Lays of Ancient Rome -
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Ebenezer Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol -
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In his novel Coningsby Benjamin Disraeli develops the theme of Conservatism uniting 'two nations', the rich and the poor -
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Friedrich Engels, after running a textile factory in Manchester, publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England -
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The three Brontë sisters jointly publish a volume of their poems and sell just two copies -
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English author William Makepeace Thackeray begins publication of his novel Vanity Fair in monthly parts (book form 1848) -
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Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë die within a period of eight months -
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Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels -
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London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases -
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Within six weeks of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, Tennyson publishes a poem finding heroism in the disaster -
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English author George Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede -
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Charles Dickens begins serial publication of his novel "Great Expectations" (in book form 1861) -
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Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas -
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Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland -
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Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier -
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The first volume of Das Kapital is completed by Marx in London and is published in Hamburg -
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Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of 20 years' research -
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Lewis Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass, a second story of Alice's adventures -
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The Aesthetic Movement and 'art for art's sake', attitudes personified above all by Whistler and Wilde, are widely mocked and satirized in Britain -
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Oxford University Press publishes the A volume of its New English Dictionary, which will take 37 years to reach Z -
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Robert Louis Stevenson introduces a dual personality in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde -
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Sherlock Holmes features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet -
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Oscar Wilde publishes his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the ever-youthful hero's portrait grows old and ugly -
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Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid animal guardians -
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H.G. Wells publishes The Time Machine, a story about a Time Traveller whose first stop on his journey is the year 802701 -
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English poet A.E. Housman publishes his first collection, A Shropshire Lad -
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English author Bram Stoker publishes Dracula, his gothic tale of vampirism in Transylvania -
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H.G. Wells publishes his science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, in which Martians arrive in a rocket to invade earth -
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Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Lord Jim about a life of failure and redemption in the far East -
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Beatrix Potter publishes at her own expense The Tale of Peter Rabbit. -
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Rudyard Kipling's experiences of India are put to good use in his novel Kim -
Period: to
Modern literature
Modernism displays a relatively strong sense of cohesion and similarity across genres and locales. Furthermore, writers who adopted the Modern point of view often did so quite deliberately and self-consciously. Indeed, a central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, -
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Rudyard Kipling publishes his Just So Stories for Little Children -
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J.M Barrie's play for children Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up has its premiere in London -
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Rudyard Kipling publishes If, which rapidly becomes his most popular poem among the British -
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Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell complete a work of mathematical logic,Principia Mathematica -
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Lytton Strachey fails to show conventional respect to four famous Victorians in his influential volume of short biographies entitled Eminent Victorians -
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In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany -
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The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot features in Agatha Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles -
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Virginia Woolf publishes her novel Mrs Dalloway, in which the action is limited to a single day -
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Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and the others make their first appearance in A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh -
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H.G. Wells publishes The Shape of Things to Come, a novel in which he accurately predicts a renewal of world war -
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T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral has its first performance in Canterbury cathedral -
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T.S. Eliot gives cats a poetic character in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats -
Period: to
Post moderns
Postmodern literature is a form of literature which is marked, stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conventions as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humor and authorial self-reference. Postmodern authors tend to reject outright meanings in their novels, stories and poems, and, instead, highlight and celebrate the possibility of multiple meanings, or a complete lack of meaning -
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English children's author Enid Blyton introduces the Famous Five in Five on a Treasure Island -
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English author Nancy Mitford has her first success with the novel The Pursuit of Love -
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Christopher Fry's verse drama The Lady's Not For Burning engages in high-spirited poetic word play -
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George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in a terrifying totalitarian state of the future, watched over by Big Brother -
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C.S. Lewis gives the first glimpse of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -
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Evelyn Waugh publishes Men at Arms, the first novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy based on his wartime experiences -
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James Bond, agent 007, has a licence to kill in Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale -
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William Golding gives a chilling account of schoolboy savagery in his first novel, Lord of the Flies -
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British philologist J.R.R. Tolkien publishes the third and final volume of his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings -
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British author Roald Dahl publishes a novel for children, James and the Giant Peach -
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Anthony Burgess publishes A Clockwork Orange, a novel depicting a disturbing and violent near-future -
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Roald Dahl publishes a fantasy treat for a starving child, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -
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English biographer Michael Holroyd completes his two-volume life of Lytton Strachey -
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English novelist John Fowles publishes The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in Lyme Regis in the 1860s -
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British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher publishes an influential economic tract, Small is Beautiful -
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English author Ruth Prawer Jhabwala wins the Booker Prize with her novel Heat and Dust -
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Iris Murdoch publishes The Sea, the Sea, and wins the 1978 Booker Prize -
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Peter Shaffer's play about Mozart, Amadeus, has its premiere in London -
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War Music is the first instalment of Christopher Logue's version of the Iliad -
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British economist Nicholas Kaldor attacks monetarism in The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher -
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English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot -
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British Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah publishes his second collection as The Dread Affair -
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English poets John Fuller and James Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems,Partingtime Hall -
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British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes -
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Racing Demon launches a trilogy on the British establishment by English playwright David Hare -
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Scottish author Irvine Welsh publishes his first novel, Trainspotting -
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Louis de Bernières publishes Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a love story set in Italian-occupied Cephalonia -
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A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone -
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Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark -
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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials -
Period: to
Contemporary
Works of contemporary literature reflect a society's social and political viewpoints, shown through realistic characters, connections to current events and socioeconomic messages. The writers are looking for trends that illuminate societal strengths and weaknesses to remind society of lessons they should learn and questions they should ask.