Overview of English literature

By facebooker_10226917254743316
  • Period: 450 to 1066

    Old English

    Some prose from otherwise legal, medical, or religious in nature, some authors Caedmon and Cynewulf, are important.
  • Period: 1066 to 1500

    Middle English Period.

    Much of the Middle English writings were religious in nature; however, from about 1350 onward, secular literature began to rise.
    Chaucer, Thomas Malory, and Robert Henryson
  • Period: 1500 to

    The Renaissance

    Four parts
    - The Elizabethan Age: Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, of course, William Shakespeare
    - The Jacobean Age: John Donne, Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, John Webster, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and Lady Mary Wroth, translation of the Bible
    - The Caroline Age: John Milton, Robert Burton, and George Herbert
    - The Commonwealth Period: Thomas Fuller, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell.
    John Milton and Thomas Hobbes appared too.
  • Period: to

    The Neoclassical Period.

    • The Restoration period: comedies, William Congreve and John Dryden, other writers: Aphra Behn, John Bunyan, and John Locke
    • The Augustan Age: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and, Daniel Defoe
    • The Age of Sensibility: Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Hester Lynch Thrale, James Boswell, and, Samuel Johnson.
      Noveslists: Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne
      poets: William Cowper and Thomas Percy.
  • Period: to

    The Romantic Period

    Renowned author of letter such as: Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley.
  • Period: to

    The Victorian Period

    One of most popular, influential, and prolific period in all of English
    Poets: Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold
    Essay: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater
    Prose: Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot , Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Samuel Butler.
  • Period: to

    The Edwardian Period.

    The era includes incredible classic novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Henry James
    Poets like Alfred Noyes and William Butler Yeats; and dramatists such as James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy.
  • Period: to

    The Georgian Period

    usually refers to the reign of George V.
    Poets: Ralph Hodgson, John Masefield, W.H. Davies, and Rupert Brooke.
    The themes and subject matter tended to be rural or pastoral in nature.
  • Period: to

    The Modern Period

    Works written after the start of World War I.
    Subject matter, style, and form.
    Novelists: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Doris Lessing; the poets W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Wilfred Owens, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Graves
    Dramatists: Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Frank McGuinness, Harold Pinter, and Caryl Churchill.
  • Period: to

    The Postmodern Period

    The postmodern period begins about the time that World War II ended.Poststructuralist literary theory and criticism developed during this time.
    Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Penelope M. Lively, and Iain Banks.