History of English literature

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  • 731

    731/ the venerable bede

    He is known as a writer and scholar, his best known work being the ecclesiastic history of Gentis Anglorum, completes his history of the English church and people.
  • 800

    800 / Beowulf

    The first great work of Germanic literature, blends the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of the Anglo and Saxons.
  • 950

    950/ Eddas

    It´s a collection of poems written in ancient Norse initially preserved in the medieval Icelandic manuscript known as Codex Regius.
  • 1300

    1300 / Duns Scotus

    known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times,
    He was a Scottish theologian belonging to the scholastic. He entered the Franciscan order and studied at Cambridge, Oxford and Paris; He was a professor at these last two universities.
  • 1340

    1340/ William of Ockham

    He was a Franciscan friar, English scholastic philosopher and logician, a native of Ockham, a small town in Surrey, near East Horsley, England.
  • 1367

    1367/ William Langland

    A narrator who calls himself Will, Poem of Piers Plowman.
    the alleged author of the first known work of Piers Plowman.
  • 1375

    1375 / Sir Gawain

    The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur,
    which also contains three other works of more Christian orientation. The four poems are linked by the use of a common dialect, the dialect variety of the Midlands of Northwest English.
  • 1387

    1387/ Chaucer

    Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death.
    He wrote some books like "The knight´s tale", "general prologue and "The pardoner´s tale".
  • 1469

    1469/ Thomas Malory

    He was the author or compiler of The Death of Arthur.
  • 1510

    1510/Erasmus

    Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance.
  • 1524

    1524/ William Tyndale

    He was a priest who made the first translation of the Bible into English, from the Hebrew and Greek texts.
  • 1549

    1549 / Thomas Cranmer

    The first version of the English prayer book is published with text by Thomas Cranmer.
  • 1564

    1564 / Marlowe and Shakespeare

    Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year.
  • 1567

    1567 /New Testament

    The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588.

  • 1587/ Tamburlaine The Great

    Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great.

  • 1601 / Hamlet

    Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age.

  • 1611/ The tempest

    Shakespeare's last completed play, "The Tempest", is performed.

  • 1616/ William Shakespeare dies

    William Shakespeare dies at New Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church.

  • 1623/ John Heminge

    John Heminge and Henry Condell publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First Folio.

  • 1688/ Aphra Behn's novel

    Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade.

  • 1719/ Daniel Defoe´s

    Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel.

  • 1747/ Samuel Richardson's

    Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language.

  • 1755/ Samuel Johnson

    Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language

  • 1793/ Mary Wollstonecraft

    English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman".

  • 1837/ Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication.

  • 1852/ Peter Mark

    London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms.

  • 1861/ Henry Wood

    Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas.

  • 1897/ Bram Stoker

    English author Bram Stoker publishes Dracula, his gothic tale of vampirism in Transylvania.

  • 1918 / Lytton Strachey

    Lytton Strachey fails to show conventional respect to four famous Victorians in his influential volume of short biographies entitled Eminent Victorians.

  • 1928/ Radclyffe Hall´s novel

    Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness is the first to deal openly with a lesbian subject.

  • 1932/ Archibald MacLeish

    US poet Archibald MacLeish publishes a narrative epic, Conquistador, about the conquest of Mexico.

  • 1960/ Penguin Books

    Penguin Books are prosecuted for obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and are acquitted.

  • 1972/ Caaryl Churchill

    English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London.

  • 1981/ Salma Rushdie

    Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children uses the moment of India's independence to launch an adventure in magic realism.

  • 1987/ Talking Heads

    Talking Heads, a series of dramatic monologues by English author Alan Bennett, is broadcast on British TV.

  • 1992/ Thom Gunn

    English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS.

  • 1997/ Harry potter

    A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

  • 2000/ Philip Pullman

    The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials.