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Apr 30, 1375
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
In it Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table, accepts a challenge from a mysterious "Green Knight" who challenges any knight to strike him with his axe if he will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts and beheads him with his blow, at which the Green Knight stands up, picks up his head and reminds Gawain of the appointed time. -
Apr 26, 1380
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
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Apr 26, 1485
Old English and Medieval Period Ends
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Apr 26, 1485
The Death of Arthur by William Claxton
Is a compilation by Sir Thomas Malory of Romance tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table. -
Period: Apr 26, 1485 to
The English Renaissance Period
It was one of the most ecciting periods in history, was both a wordly and a religious age. -
Apr 26, 1516
Utopia by Thomas More
The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. -
Apr 29, 1517
Roman Catholic Church Split
It was split when a German Monk name Martin Luther nailed a list of dissenting beliefs to the door of a German church. -
Apr 23, 1564
William Shakespeare
Wrote Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Was one of the most poplular poets during the Elizabethan Age. -
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of William Shakespeare about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays. -
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Set in the Kingdom of Denmark, the play dramatizes the revenge Prince Hamlet exacts on his uncle Claudius for murdering King Hamlet, Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father, and then succeeding to the throne and taking as his wife Gertrude, the old king's widow and Prince Hamlet's mother. The play vividly portrays both true and feigned madness from overwhelming grief to seething rage and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption. -
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
It is considered one of his darkest and most powerful tragedies. Set in Scotland, the play dramatizes the corroding psychological and political effects produced when its protagonist, the Scottish lord Macbeth, chooses evil as the way to fulfill his ambition for power. He commits regicide to become king and then furthers his moral descent with a reign of murderous terror to stay in power, eventually plunging the country into civil war. In the end, he loses everything that gives meaning and purpos -
The King James Bible Translated by King James I
Is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611. First printed by the King's Printer Robert Barker, this was the third translation into English to be approved by the English Church authorities. The first was the Great Bible commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII, and the second was the Bishops' Bible of 1568. -
Period: to
Age of Reason
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Songs and Sonnts by John Donne
The Variorum Edition of John Donne's work proposes three sequences for the total of nineteen sonnets. The first, the "original sequence", contains twelve sonnets; the second, the "Westmoreland sequence", contains nineteen; and the third, the "revised sequence", contains the twelve sonnets of the original sequence in a different order. -
Lycidas by John Milton
The poem itself begins with a pastoral image of laurels and myrtles, “symbols of poetic fame; as their berries are not yet ripe, the poet is not yet ready to take up his pen." However, the speaker is so filled with sorrow for the death of Lycidas that he finally begins to write an elegy. -
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The poem concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men". -
Period: to
The Romantic Period
Was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850 -
Frankenstein by Marry Shelley
Eccentric scientist Victor Frankenstein, creates a grotesque creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Frankenstein is infused with some elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement and is also considered to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction. -
Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contains a narrator's discourse on a series of designs on a Grecian urn. -
Ode to the West Wind by Percy Shelley
The poem begins with three cantos describing the wind's effects upon earth, air, and ocean. The last two cantos are Shelley speaking directly to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him like a leaf, a cloud or a wave and make him its companion in its wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and spread them all over the world so that the youth are awoken with his ideas. The poem ends with an optimistic note which is that if winter days are here then spring is not very far. -
Period: to
The Victorian Period
It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence for Britain. -
The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson
It was loosely based on the Arthurian legend of Elaine of Astolat, as recounted in a thirteenth-century Italian novella titled Donna di Scalotta with the earlier version being closer to the source material than the later. Tennyson focused on the Lady's "isolation in the tower and her decision to participate in the living world, two subjects not even mentioned in Donna di Scalotta." -
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
The speaker is giving the emissary of his prospective new wife a tour of the artworks in his home. He draws a curtain to reveal a painting of a woman, explaining that it is a portrait of his late wife; he invites his guest to sit and look at the painting. As they look at the portraitof the late Duchess, the Duke describes her happy, cheerful and flirtatious nature, which had displea of the late Duchess, the Duke describes her happy, cheerful and flirtatious nature, which had displeased him. -
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Browning
By far the most famous poems from this collection, with one of the most famous opening lines in the English language, are numbers 33 and 43: "Yes, call me by my pet-name!" and "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." -
Period: to
Modern Era
Began after the death of Queen Victoria -
Ulysses by James Joyce
Considered one of the most important works of Modernist literature, it has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". "Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking." -
The Wast Land by T.S. Eliot
The style of the poem overall is marked by the hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts that Eliot peppered throughout the poem. -
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Old Major, the old boar on the Manor Farm, calls the animals on the farm together for a meeting, during which he compares the humans to parasites and teaches the animals a revolutionary song, 'Beasts of England'. When Major dies, two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, assume command and consider it a duty to prepare for the Rebellion. The animals revolt and drive the drunken and irresponsible Mr Jones from the farm, renaming it "Animal Farm". They adopt Seven Commandments of Animalism. -
Old English and Medieval Periods Began
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Beowulf
In the poem, Beowulf, a hero of the Geats in Scandinavia, comes to the help of Hroðgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall (in Heorot) has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland in Sweden and later becomes king of the Geats. After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle. -
Period: to Apr 26, 1485
Old English and Medieval Periods
