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1066 BCE
450 -1066 OLD ENGLISH
Begins with the Anglo-Saxon, or Old English - epic poetry was exemplified in "Beowulf - beautiful elegies, including "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer.- poetry is alliterative, rather than rhyming, and is known for its use of the kenning, a compressed metaphor such as whale-road or night-stalker. The most famous example of Old English literature is the anonymous epic "Beowulf" -
1500
1066 -1500 MIDDLE ENGLISH
French became the language of the educated classes gradually blending with Anglo-Saxon to produce Middle English, best known as the language of Geoffrey Chaucer. (medieval romances, such as the tales of King Arthur), The most famous work in Middle English is "The Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer. had many famous contemporaries, William Shakespeare is the best-known author of the Elizabethan period. -
1550- 1660 ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
It's exacting and brilliant achievements, the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods have been said to represent the most brilliant century of all. (The reign of Elizabeth I began in 1558 and ended with her death in 1603; she was succeeded by the Stuart king James VI of Scotland, who took the title James I of England as well. English literature of his reign as James I, from 1603 to 1625, is properly called Jacobean.) -
1653 -1660 – PURITAN
During this period the term "Puritan" becomes largely moot, therefore, in British terms, though the situation in New England was very different. After the English Restoration the Savoy Conference and Uniformity Act 1662 drove most of the Puritan ministers from the Church of England, and the outlines of the Puritan movement changed over a few decades into the collections of Presbyterian and Congregational churches, operating as they could as Dissenters under changing regimes. -
1660 -1700 – RESTORATION AGE
The Restoration: a Political and Religious History of England and Wales (Clarendon; Oxford, 1985) by contrasting the attention historians had paid to the English Civil War with the relatively few monographs devoted to the subsequent phase of history: in his words, "the history of the English Revolution now reads like a marvellous story with the last chapter missing". -
1700 – 1798 - 18TH CENTURY (AUGUSTAN – AGE OF REASON)
During the 18th century literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason): a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century by people like Isaac Newton and the writings of Descartes, John Locke and Francis Bacon. -
1798 – 1837 – ROMANTICISM
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Various dates are given for the Romantic period in British literature, but here the publishing of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is taken as the beginning, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end, even though, for example, William Wordsworth lived until 1850 and both Robert Burns and William Blake published before 1798. -
1837 -1901- VICTORIAN
This course opens up a rich archive drawing together genres and themes in Victorian and Edwardian art and design, the course explores changes from historicist and narrative art. Central to these movements is the industrialisation of societies, and the ways the shifts were expressed in art and design through visual constructions of nature and culture, history and myth, and the arts and crafts in the British Empire and Australia. -
1901 – 1940 – MODERN LITERATURE
In terms of the Euro-American tradition, the main periods are captured in the bipartite division, Modernist literature and Postmodern literature, flowering from roughly 1900 to 1940 and 1960 to 1990[1] respectively, divided, as a rule of thumb, by World War II. The somewhat malleable term of contemporary literature is usually applied with a post-1960 cutoff point. -
1940 – 2000 – POST MODERNS
Modernism is a major literary movement of the first part of the twentieth-century. The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature.
In the mid-twentieth-century major writers started to appear in the various countries of the British Commonwealth, including several Nobel laureates. -
CONTERMPORARY
Contemporary literature is defined as literature written after World War II through the current day. While this is a vague definition, there is not a clear-cut explanation of this concept -- only interpretation by scholars and academics. While there is some disagreement, most agree that contemporary literature is writing completed after 1940.
