Time Periods in Literature

  • Period: 1200 BCE to 455

    I. Classical Period

  • Period: 1200 BCE to 800 BCE

    Homeric Period

    Greek legends were passed oraly, this legends include warriors, princeses, pirates, etc. From this period was the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer.
  • Period: 800 BCE to 200 BCE

    Classical Greek Period

    Some writers and philosophers are Gorgias, Aesop, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Euripides, and Sophocles. This is when the Golden Age of Greece started, there was the start of democrasy and some of the best arts originated in Athenas.
  • Period: 200 BCE to 455

    Classical Roman Period

    Was influences by greek culture when it was invaded in 146 CE. Playwrights of this time include Plautus and Terence. Rome was in the dictatorship of Julio Cesar and then into a morachy of Cesar Augustus in 27 CE, this period is known as the Roman Imperial Period. Some writes from this period are Ovid, Horace, and Virgil.
  • Period: 70 to 455

    Patristic Period

    Some writers are Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Saint Cyprian, Saint Ambrose and Saint Jerome. This is when the Bible was being writen. At this time christianity was being spread across Europe and the Roman Empire was starting to die.
  • Period: 428 to 1066

    The Old Englidh (Anglo-Saxon) Period

    The "Dark Ages" when the Roman Empire fell and the Barbarians started to move across Europe. Some poems such as Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafare were written in this period as well as the encyclopedias, medival grammars, etc and most stories abbout Vikings.
  • Period: 455 to 1485

    II. The Medival Period

  • Period: 1066 to 1450

    The Middle English Period

    Norman French armies invaded England under William I marking the end of the Anglo-Saxon Heriarchy. The French Fables were very popular as well as Marie de France and Jeun de Meun.
  • Period: 1200 to 1485

    Late or "High" Medival Period

    This time period is marked by the Middle English writting of Geoffrey Chaucer, the "Gawain" or "Pearl" Poet, the Wakefield Master, and William Langland.
  • Period: 1485 to

    III. The Renaissance and Reformation

  • Period: 1485 to 1558

    Early Tudor Period

    The time of the War of Roses won by Henry (VII) Tudor. Marthin Luther started the protestantism and split the church. Later Henry VIII turned the England into a protestant country. A poet from this era was Edmund Spencer.
  • Period: 1558 to

    Elisabetan Period

    Queen Elisabeth saved England from a spanish invasion and internal disputes. A very famous writer from this era was William Shakespeare.
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    Jocobine Period

    Later Shakesperian work
  • Period: to

    Caroline Period

    During the reign of Charled I, some writers: John Milton, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, the "Sons of Ben" and others.
  • Period: to

    Commonwealth Period/Puritan Interregnum

    John Milton, Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Browne.
  • Period: to

    IV. The Enlightenment (Neoclassical) Period

    America's revolution against England marked this time.
  • Period: to

    Restoration Period

    English king returned to the throne after a Purtian domination. It started a dominance of France and Classical influencers in poetry and drama. Some writers are John Dryden, John Locke, Sir William Temple, and Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, (English) Jean Racine and Molière (Abroad).
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    The Augustan Age

    Writers from this age such as, Addison, Steele, Swift, and Alexander Pope, Voltaire, were highly influenced by Virgil and Horace.
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    The Age of Johnson

    This period marks the transition from the neoclassical to the romanticist period. Some popular writers of this period were Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and Edward Gibbon.
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    Gothic Period

    Overlaps with the Romantic and Victorian period. A very famous book from this period is Dracula. Some writers are Poe and Hawthorne. It is considered the precursor of horror movies.
  • Period: to

    Romantic Period

    In this time it was common to write about nature, imagination and individuality. Some important writers were Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Johann Von Goethe and Jane Austen.
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    Victorian Period and the 19th Century

    Sentimental novels from the reign of Queen Victoria. Some writers are Elizabeth Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and the Brontë sisters. The end was marked by the decadence and the Aestheticism (Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane)
  • Period: to

    The Modern Period

    In this period,writings are influenced by World War I and World War II so the dominant fashion is realism and disillusionment. Some famous writers which were considered part of the Lost Generation are Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald,W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf and Wilfred Owen.
  • Period: to

    The Postmodern Period (1945 - onward)

    Experimentation with metafiction and fragmented poetry. Some writers are T. S. Eliot, Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard, Fowles, Calvino, Ginsberg and Pynchon. There are also surrealistic and magic realist writers such as Gabriel Gracia Marquez, Borges, JK Rawling, Riick Riordan, etc.