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Period: 200 BCE to 428 BCE
OLD ENGLISH
HISTORICAL OR NON ENGLISH / AMERICAN ITEM
‘Old English’ implied that there was a cultural continuity between the England of the sixth century and the England of the nineteenth century (when German, and later British, philologists determined that there had been phases in the development of the English language which they described as ‘Old’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Modern’). -
Period: 1 BCE to 428 BCE
CELTIC AND ROMAN BRITAIN
From around 750 BC to 12 BC, the Celts were the most powerful people in central and northern Europe. There were many groups (tribes) of Celts, speaking a vaguely common language. The word Celt comes from the Greek word, Keltoi, which means barbarians and is properly pronounced as "Kelt" -
Period: 428 to 1100
OLD ENGLISH ( ANGLO-SAXON) PERIOD
encompasses literature written in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) during the 600-year Anglo-Saxon period of Britain, from the mid-5th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others.450-1066*;oral tradition, narrative poems, religious themes*Norman conquest of England by the French -
700
BEOWULF
BEOWULF COMPOSED -
1066
BATTLE OF HASTINGS ( NORMAN CONQUEST)
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Period: 1066 to 1500
MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD
1066-1500;tales of knights and lords, religious themes.
The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court. -
1215
SIGNING OF THE CARTA MAGNA
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1307
DANTE'S DIVINA COMEDIA
*c.1307- 1321 -
1387
CHAUCER, "prologue" to Canterbury Tales
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1492
COLOMBUS LANDS IN AMERICA
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Period: 1500 to
THE RENAISSANCE ( in England; 1607-1780 is considered the "Colonial" period in America)
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1517
Martin Luther post his theses in Wittenberg, leading to Protestant Reformation.
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1532
Machiavelli, The Prince.
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1539
English Bible. The "Great Bible"
(The "Great Bible") published *1558 -1603 — Reign of Queen Elizabeth I. -
1564
Life of William Shakespeare
1564 — 1616 — Life of William Shakespeare -
Shakespeare's Hamlet
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Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I
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Settlement at Jamestown, Virginia
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King James translation of the Bible *1620
1611- 1620 -
Pilgrims land at Plymouth
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Bay Psalm Book: first book printed in America
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Execution of Charles I.
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1660 — Commonwealth Period–England ruled by Parliament
1649- 1660 -
*1660 — Charles II restored to the throne ("The Restoration")
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Period: to
1660 — 1798: Neoclassical Period (also known as "The Long 18th Century"
1660-1798;"new classic"Return to Ancient Roman/ Greek leaders -plays-orations-fixed form poetry -
John Milton, Paradise Lost
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Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica
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Salem witchcraft executions
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Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
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Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
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Samuel Richardson, Pamela
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The Great Awakening (religious revival)
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Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
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Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
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1755 - Ben Johnson, Dictionary
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1760-67 — Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy
1760-67 -
1765-1830 — Revolutionary and Early National Period
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Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village"
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Ben Franklin, Autobiography
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1775-1783 — Revolutionary War
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1776 —Declaration of Independence
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1783-85 — Noah Webster, Grammatical Institute of the English Language (speller, grammar, reader)
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1789 — French Revolution begins
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William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
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Period: to
ROMANTIC PERIOD
The period we are considering begins in the latter half of the reign of George III and ends with the accession of Victoria in 1837. When on a foggy morning in November, 1783, King George entered the House of Lords and in a trembling voice recognized the independence of the United States of America. -
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
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Lord Byron, Don Juan I and II
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The Missouri Compromise
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Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
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Edgar Allan Poe, Poems
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Period: to
1832-1870: Early Victorian Age (English Literature)
The Victorian Age in English literature began in second quarter of the nineteenth century and ended by 1900. Though strictly speaking, the Victorian age ought to correspond with the reign of Queen Victoria, which extended from 1837 to 1901, yet literary movements rarely coincide with the exact year of royal accession or death. -
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
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1836 — Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers
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Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
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Robert Browning, Dramatic Lyrics; Lord Tennyson, Poems
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Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
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1847 — Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
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1847-8 — Thackeray, Vanity Fair
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Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
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Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter
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Herman Melville, Moby Dick
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Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
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Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
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Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species
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George Eliot, Mill on the Floss
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*1860-5 — American Civil War
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Period: to
1865-1914: Realistic Period (American Literature)
1865-1914 <– (after civil war)social stories without obvious presence of the author. In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. -
Karl Marx, Das Kapital
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1868 — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
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George Eliot, Middlemarch
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Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
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1876 — Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
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Henry James, Daisy Miller; * Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
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Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
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Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
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Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession •
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Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
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1900 — Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
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Period: to
Naturalistic and Symbolistic Period (American Only)
Naturalism sought to go further and be more explanatory than Realism by identifying the underlying causes for a person’s actions or beliefs. The thinking was that certain factors, such as heredity and social conditions, were unavoidable determinants in one’s life. A poor immigrant could not escape their life of poverty because their preconditions were the only formative aspects in his or her existence that mattered. -
1901-1910: Edwardian Period
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Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Jack London, The Call of the Wild
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Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
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1907 — John Millington Synge, Playboy of the Western World
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D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
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Period: to
1914-1918: First World War
The Great War, which took place between 1914-1918, shook the very foundations of the Western world, causing a societal upheaval that left immediate and lasting impressions on every aspect of society and culture. Great Britain, as one of the primary belligerents of the conflict, was no exception; and experienced a wave of social and artistic change as a direct result of the war. -
T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
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Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow
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James Joyce, Ulysses; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
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E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
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Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
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T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Earnest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
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William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
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W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems
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John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men; The Red Pony
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James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
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Period: to
1939-1945: The Second World War
The outbreak of war in 1939, as in 1914, brought to an end an era of great intellectual and creative exuberance. Individuals were dispersed; the rationing of paper affected the production of magazines and books; and the poem and the short story, convenient forms for men under arms, became the favoured means of literary expression. It was hardly a time for new beginnings, although the poets of the New Apocalypse movement produced three anthologies (1940–45) inspired by Neoromantic anarchism. -
Richard Wright, Native Son
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George Orwell, Animal Farm
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Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
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J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
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Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita
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1957 — Jack Kerouac, On the Road
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Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
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Iris Murdock, A Severed Head
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Theodore Roethke, The Far Field
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Period: to
1965 - ? Postmodernist Period •
1965-present <—- after WWIIanti-heros, media culture, numerous irony, and social conflict -
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
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Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
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Alice Walker, The Color Purple
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Raymond Carver, Cathedral
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Toni Morrison, Beloved
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Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
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Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club; Thoman Pynchon, Vineland
