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701 BCE
The Odyssey was written
Homer writes a description of Odysseus‘s ten year struggle to return to his homelands after the Trojan War and his wife’s trying times to remain faithful. -
430 BCE
Pericles’ Funeral Oration
Pericles' Funeral Oration is a famous speech from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. The speech was delivered by Pericles, an eminent Athenian politician, at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) as a part of the annual public funeral for the war dead. -
Period: 1500 to
The Renaissance
The Renaissance is known as an awakening of Europe after The Dark Ages. The fourteenth through sixteenth centuries in Europe were witnessed as a deliberate break with feudal modes of living. -
Period: to
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason and brought many new ideas and activities to Western Europe and the American colonies. The Enlightenment was at its center a celebration of ideas about what the human mind was capable of, and what could be achieved through action and method. Many of the new, enlightened ideas were political in nature. -
Period: to
Romancticism/Romantic Movement
No other period in literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Romanticism can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle ofpression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes -
Period: to
Realism
On one level, Realism is precisely what it sounds like. It is attention to detail, and an effort to replicate the true nature of reality in a way that novelists had never attempted. There is the belief that the novel’s function is simply to report what happens, without comment or judgment. Seemingly inconsequential elements gain the attention of the novel functioning in the realist mode. -
Period: to
Trancendentalism
On the most basic level, Transcendentalism represented a new way of understanding truth and knowledge. The roots of the philosophy go back to Germany, specifically the writings and theories of Immanuel Kant. In contrast to the scientific revolution -
Period: to
Victorian Literature
The movement roughly comprises the years from 1830 to 1900, though there is ample disagreement regarding even this simple point. The name given to the period is borrowed from the royal matriarch of England, Queen Victoria, who sat on throne from 1837 to 1901. Everything that the previous centuries had held as sacred and indisputable truth came under assault during the middle and latter parts of the nineteenth century. -
Period: to
Existentialism
Existentialism has its roots in the writings of several nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers.There are therefore countless permutations and flavors of existentialism which cross disciplinary lines and modes of inquiry. In the most general sense, existentialism deals with the problem of finding meaning within existence -
Period: to
Naturalism
This literary movement found expression almost exclusively within the novel. Naturalism also found its greatest number of practitioners in America shortly before and after the turn of the twentieth century. 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 Doll’s House was written
A Doll's House is a three-act play written by Norway's Henrik Ibsen. It premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month. -
A Doll’s House premiered
A Doll’s House premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879 -
Period: to
The Bloomsbury Group
This was a time where a group of people came together to discuss topics related to their writings and gain ideas from those around them. Most of the writings presented were those that were debated greatly by the group. This group was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, the best known members of which included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. -
Period: to
Modernism
The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks. -
The Odyssey was published
Homer, and A.T. Murray, W. Heinemann publish The Odyssey -
The Second Coming by W.B Yeats
“The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. This poem had a great impact not only on the time period where it was presented but also during the time of when Things Fall Apart was written. -
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
In “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Thurber tells the story of Walter Mitty, a man who lives in a dream world to escape from the routines and humiliations he suffers in everyday life. The action takes place over the course of a single day, during which Walter Mitty and his wife go on their weekly shopping trip. -
The Great Divorce was written
C.S. Lewis, most famous for his Narnia children’s series, was also a devout Christian who wrote prolifically about his faith, often in the form of allegorical stories. The Great Divorce is one such allegory, in which the nameless protagonist finds himself on a journey between Purgatory and Heaven. -
The Great Divorce was published
The Great Divorce was first printed as a serial in an Anglican newspaper called The Guardian in 1944 and 1945, and soon thereafter in book form by Geoffrey Bles. -
Period: to
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. -
Things Fall Apart was written
Things Fall Apart is a novel written by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe in 1957. The story focuses on pre- and post-colonial life in late nineteenth century Nigeria. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. -
Things Fall Apart was published
In 1957, Achebe completed Things Fall Apart and sent it to publishers in Britain. It was repeatedly rejected, with the publishers seeing no market potential in a book by an African writer, before finally being accepted by the publisher Heinemann and published in 1958. -
Period: to
Post-Modernism
Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late-20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism and that marked a departure from modernism. -
Thousand Pieces of Gold was written
Thousand Pieces of Gold is an 1981 historical novel by Ruthanne Lum McCunn and based on the life of Polly Bemis, a 19th-century Chinese immigrant woman in the American Old West. -
Thousand Pieces of Gold was published
Published by Beacon Press in 1981 -
How I Got That Name by Marilyn Chin
This poem is written as a essay of assimilation, illustrating how people can be very stereotypical, and it expresses that our identities are not seen as something we earn but they are what is given to us by how others look at us. -
Shisoi by Luci Tapaphonso
This poem is written by a grandmother about her granddaughter and the love and joy the child brings to the family. -
Teenagers by Pat Mora
This poem was written to express a time when children transform into teenagers, and although they seem familiar, they are unrecognizable. -
Immigrants by Pat Mora
Pat Mora is a modern poet, a native of El Paso, Texas, who explores the theme of borders,political, cultural, social, emotional in her writing. She explains how this poem speaks to a time when immigrants have children in America and wonder if others will approve of the diversity. -
The Dessert is My Mother by Pat Mora
This poem describes a dessert as it acts like a mother to the one it nurtures. This poem is a poetic depiction, in English and Spanish, of the desert as the provider of comfort, food, spirit, and life.