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Period of English Literature

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  • 449 BCE

    The Anglo - Saxon or Old English Period

    The Anglo - Saxon or Old English Period
    From 449 A.D. to 1100 A.D
    Characteristics:
    -They had no writing (except runes, used as charms) until they learned the Latin alphabet from Roman missionaries.
    -The earliest written works in Old English were probably composed orally at first and may have been passed on from speaker to speaker before being written.

    -Old English literature is mostly chronicle and poetry - lyric, descriptive but chiefly narrative or epic.
    Writers: Caedmon, Aefric and King Alfred. Almost of writings are anonymous.
  • 1066

    The Norman - French Period

    The Norman - French Period
    From 1066 to about 1350
    Characteristics:
    - Initially, much dialectic variation.
    - Loss of many grammar inflections.
    - French scribes brought new French - based writing conventions.
    Writers:
    - Geoffrey of Monmouth
    - Historia Regum Britanniae' (Latin), about 1136
    - Wace, 'Brut' (French), about 1155
    - Laghamon, 'Brut' (English), about 1200.
  • 1350

    Middle English and Chaucer

    Middle English and Chaucer
    About 1350 to about 1500
    Characteristics:
    - It was essentiality an era of unrest and transition.
    - It is characterized by a noticeable departure from medievalism to an era of rational inquiry and critical understanding.
    - It marks the beginning of a new language and literature.
    Writers:
    - Geoffrey Chaucer (?1343-1400)
    - William Langlands
    Narrative poetry:
    - Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales.
  • 1500

    The Renaissance and the Elizabethan Period

    The Renaissance and the Elizabethan Period
    About 1500 to 1603.
    Characteristics:
    - Before the 16th century English drama meant the amateur
    performances of Bible stories by craft guilds on public holidays.
    - Great discoveries and activity, both intellectual and physical.
    Prose Fiction:
    - Sidney's 'Arcadia.' Spenser, 1552−1599.
    - 'The Faerie Queene,' 1590 and later.
    Lyric poetry: John Donne.
    The Drama. Classical and native influences: Marlowe, Shakspere, Ben Jonson and other dramatists

  • The Seventeenth Century, 1603−1660.

    The Seventeenth Century, 1603−1660.
    The First Stuart Kings, James I (to 1625) and Charles I.
    Cavaliers and Puritans. The Civil War and the Commonwealth.
    Cromwell.
    The Drama, to 1642.
    Francis Bacon.
    The King James Bible, 1611.
    Lyric Poets:
    - Herrick. The 'Metaphysical' religious poets — Herbert
    - Crashaw
    - Vaughan

  • The Restoration Period

    The Restoration Period
    From the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the death of Dryden in 1700.
    Characteristics:
    - A new kind of comic drama, dealing with issues of sexual politics among the wealthy and the bourgeois, arose.
    - This is Restoration Comedy, and the style developed well beyond the restoration period into the mid 18th century almost.
    Writers and written:
    - William and Mary, 1688−1702.
    - Butler's 'Hudibras.'
    - Pepys' 'Diary.'
    - The Restoration Drama.
    - Dryden, 1631−1700.

  • Prose Fiction and The Novel. About 1667 to 1778.

    Prose Fiction and The Novel. About 1667 to 1778.
    Characteristics:
    - Prose narratives were written in the 16th century, but the novel as we know it could not arise, in the absence of a literate public.
    - The popular and very contemporary medium for narrative in the 16th century is the theatre.
    - The earliest novels reflect a bourgeois view of the world because this is the world of the authors and their readers.
    Writers:
    - Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
    - Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.
    - Samuel Richardson

  • Romanticism

    Romanticism
    About 1726 to 1821
    Characteristics:
    - A movement in philosophy but especially in literature, romanticism is the revolt of the senses or passions against the intellect and of the individual against the consensus.
    Writers and poets:
    - William Blake (1757-1827)
    - William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
    - George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

  • Victorian poetry - The Victorian novel - Later Victorian novelists About 1830 to 1901

    Victorian poetry - The Victorian novel - Later Victorian novelists About 1830 to 1901
    Characteristics:
    - The growth of literacy in the Victorian era leads to enormous diversification in the subjects and settings of the
    novel.
    - The change in the reading public is reflected in a
    change in the subjects of novels: the high bourgeois world of Austen gives way to an interest in characters of humble origins.
    Poets:
    - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

    - Robert Browning
    - William Makepeace Thackeray

  • Early 20th century poets - Early modern writers - Poetry in the later 20th century

    Early 20th century poets - Early modern writers - Poetry in the later 20th century
    About 1936 to 1995
    Poets and Novelists:
    - W.B. (William Butler) Yeats (1865-1939)
    - T.S.(Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965)
    - Housman (1859-1936)
    - Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
    - Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
    - Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
    - Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
    - Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
    - Henry James (1843-1916)
    - Pole Joseph Conrad (Josef Korzeniowski; 1857-1924).
    - R.L. Stevenson (1850-94)
    - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)