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Period: 450 to 1066
OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE
Old English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses the surviving literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England with genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles and riddles.
Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous but you can find Cædmon, Bede, Alfred the Great, and Cynewulf.
Cædmon is the earliest English poet whose name is known. -
Period: 1066 to 1500
MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
The Norman-French of Wace was adapted to produce the first English-language work to present the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which was the first historiography written in English since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Literature in England was being written in various languages, including Latin, Norman-French, and English: Gower (c. 1330–1408) is remembered primarily for three major works: the Mirroir de l'Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis, -
Period: 1500 to
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
The beginning of the English Renaissance is often taken to be 1485, when the Battle of Bosworth Field ended the Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the Tudor Dynasty. After William Caxton introduced the printing press in England in 1476, vernacular literature flourished.
This period was a cultural and artistic movement in England from the late 15th to the 17th century. Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance. -
Period: 1558 to
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE, include ELIZABETHAN PERIOD
POETRY.
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) was one of the most important poets of the Elizabethan period, author of The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596) Sir Philip Sidney(1554–1586), also Astrophel, Stella, The Defence of Poetry, and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. DRAMA
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) stands out in this period as a poet and playwright and with histories (such as Richard III and Henry IV), tragedies (such as Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, comedies and romances and tragicomedies. -
Period: to
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE, also include JACOBEAN PERIOD
In the early 17th century Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays", as well as tragedies, including Macbeth and King Lear, The Tempest. The poet and dramatist Ben Jonson (1572–1637) was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era with Volpone (1605 or 1606)) and Bartholomew Fair (1614). POETRY
George Chapman (c. 1559 – c. 1634) is remembered chiefly for his famous translation in 1616 of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse. -
Period: to
The CAROLINE era
The Caroline Age has its time span of Charles First. The Caroline era refers to the era in English and Scottish history during the Stuart period (1603–1714) that coincided with the reign of Charles I (1625–1642), it was followed by the Wars of the three Kingdoms (1642–1651) and the English Interregnum (1651–1660).
In this time the spirit of Renaissance began declining. It is a very fruitful period in terms of its creative writings. John Milton started his writing in this period. -
Period: to
PURITAN PERIOD
When James I died in 1625, the new monarch Charles I took religious persecution to a new level. He continued to show open disregard to Parliament and people.
The first Puritan or Pilgrim settlement is at Plymouth. The Puritans had a huge cultural and political role in crystallizing the American life.
The prominent writers of the age are William Bradford, John Winthrop, Edward Taylor etc. William Bradford wrote extensively about Puritan life in terms of honest and hard working folks. -
Period: to
RESTORATION AGE
Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress.
John Milton´s Paradise Lost (1667) was one of the greatest English poets, wrote at this time of religious flux and political upheaval.
John Dryden (1631–1700) was a literary critic, translator, and playwright with works like the mock-heroic MacFlecknoe (1682), Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was heavily influenced by Dryden. -
Period: to
18th CENTURY
The 18th century saw the development of the modern novel as literary genre. Many candidates for the first novel in English are in this period, of which Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe it can be the best known. Subgenres of the novel during the 18th century were the epistolary novel, the sentimental novel, histories, the gothic novel and the libertine novel.
It started in the Age of Enlightenment and gradually moved towards Romanticism. In the visual arts, it was the period of Neoclassicism. -
Period: to
18th Century, AUGUSTAN AGE
The 18th century in English literature has been called the Augustan Age, the Neoclassical Age, and the Age of Reason; 'the Augustan Age' comes from the self-conscious imitation of the original Augustan writers, Virgil and Horace, by many of the writers of the period. Specifically, the Augustan Age was the period after the Restoration era to the death of Alexander Pope (~1690 - 1744). The major writers of the age were Pope and John Dryden in poetry, and Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison in prose. -
Period: to
18th Century, AGE OF SENSIBILITY
It is also sometimes described as the "Age of Johnson". Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer.
Other famous novels in English are Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771). -
Period: to
ROMANTICISM PERIOD
Romanticism as a reaction against the ideals of order, calm, harmony, idealization and rationality which marked Classicismwas a movement that dominated all genres; including literature, music, art and architecture; in Europe and the United States in the first half of the 19th century. It was originated in late 18th century
The best known English Romantic poets include Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley. In America, the most famous Romantic poet was Edgar Allan Poe. -
Period: to
VICTORIAN LITERATURE
It this era (1837–1901), the novel became the leading literary genre in English. Was almost a reaction to rapid industrialization, and the social, political, and economic issues associated with it. Significant early examples of this genre include Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) by Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1849).
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) emerged on the literary scene in the late 1830s and soon became the most famous novelist in the history of English literature. -
Period: to
MODERN LITERATURE
The movement was influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), James G. Frazer (1854–1941), Karl Marx (1818–1883) (Das Kapital, 1867), and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), among others.
A major British lyric poet of the first decades of the twentieth-century was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) published his famous dystopia Brave New World in 1932. -
Period: to
POST MODERNS
Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Among writers are the Americans Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote and Thomas Pynchon.
Among British writers in the 1940s and 1950s were poet Dylan Thomas and novelist Graham Greene whose works span the 1930s to the 1980s, while Evelyn Waugh, W.H. -
Period: to
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Most agree that contemporary literature is writing completed after 1940. It is defined as literature written after World War II through the current day. It reflects a society's social and/or political viewpoints, shown through realistic characters, connections to current events and socioeconomic messages; speak on the topics and questions that were raised during this traumatic time in world history. We find Isabel Allende, Michael Tran, Quim Llenas, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison among others.