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Period: 450 to 1066
OLD ENGLISH
BEGINNING: The Angles and the Saxons invaded (along with the Jutes) Celtic England circa 450.
End: Norman France, under William, conquered England. CHARACTERISTICS:
- Oral literature.
- A lot of the prose was a translation of something else or otherwise legal, medical, or religious in nature. WORKS AND AUTHORS:
- "Beowulf" (anonymous) / 975-1025
- History of the English church and people (The Venerable Bede) / 731
- The material of the Eddas / 959
- Caedmon and Cynewulf -
Period: 1066 to 1500
MIDDLE ENGLISH
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Much of the writings were religious in nature.
- English gained credibility as a literary language in a culture where educated people wrote mainly in Latin.
- The language of Geoffrey Chaucer.
- Medieval romances.
- Feudalism.
- Protestant tradition.
WORKS AND AUTHORS:
- "Piers Plowman" (William Langland) / 1367
- "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (Poet Pearl)
- "The Canterbury Tales" (Geoffrey Chaucer) / 1387
- "Morte d'Arthur" (Thomas Malory) / 1469
- Robert Henryson -
1350
SECULAR LITERATURE
Secular literature began to rise.
MEANING:
Secular literature is literature that does not come out of the religious world-view of whoever is categorizing it as ‘secular’. -
Period: 1500 to
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Also called the "Early modern" period.
- Shakespeare's plays were: comedies, tragedies, and histories.
- It is subdivided into 4 parts:
a. Elizabethan Age (1558 - 1603)
b. The Jacobean Age (1603 - 1625)
c. The Caroline Age (1625 - 1649)
d. Commonwealth Period (1649 - 1660)
WORKS AND AUTHORS:
- "Hamlet" (William Shakespeare) / 1601
- "Utopia" (Thomas More) / 1510
- "The Faerie Queen" (Edmund Spenser) / 1590 -
Period: 1558 to
ELIZABETHAN AGE
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Golden Age of English drama.
NOTEWORTHY FIGURES:
- Christopher Marlowe
- Francis Bacon
- Edmund Spenser
- Sir Walter Raleigh
- William Shakespeare -
Period: to
NEOCLASSICAL
CHARACTERISTICS:
- It is subdivided into ages:
a. The Restoration (1660 - 1700).
b. The Augustan Age (1700 - 1745).
c. The Age of Sensibility (1745 - 1785).
WORKS:
- "Paradise Lost" (John Milton) /1667
- "Gulliver's Travels" (Jonathan Swift) /1726
- "Dictionary of the English Language" (Samuel Johnson) /1755 -
Period: to
JACOBEAN AGE
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Reign of James I
WORKS:
- The King James translation of the Bible.
AUTHORS:
- John Donne.
- Shakespeare.
- Michael Drayton.
- John Webster.
- Elizabeth Cary.
- Ben Jonson.
- Lady Mary Wroth. -
Period: to
CAROLINE AGE
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Reign of Charles I ("Carolus").
NOTABLE FIGURES:
- John Milton.
- Robert Burton.
- George Herbert. -
Period: to
COMMONWEALTH PERIOD
The period between the end of the English Civil War and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy.
PROSE WRITERS:
- Thomas Fuller.
- Abraham Cowley.
- Andrew Marvell. -
Period: to
PURITAN
Puritan literature was direct and focused on offering instruction from a Biblical point of view.
Puritan literature relied on a first-person narrative. Puritan author's writings coming in the form of journals, diaries, and day-to-day experiences.
Works focused on realistic messages illustrating the idea that everyone was born a sinner and that his or her salvation had been pre-determined, a concept known as predestination.
AUTHORS:
- Thomas Vincent
- John Bunyan
- John Flavel
- Thomas Watson -
Period: to
THE RESTORATION AGE
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Restoration comedies (comedies of manner) developed during this time.
- Satire became popular with the success of Samuel Butler.
PLAYWRIGHTS:
- William Congreve.
- John Dryden.
NOTABLE WRITERS:
- Aphra Behn.
- John Bunyan.
- John Locke. -
Period: to
18th CENTURY
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Essayists and satirists.
- The essay was developed into an influential and widely popular art form.
- Appearance of the novel and its precursors, a long prose narrative with a realistic setting and three-dimensional characters.
- Age of Enlightenment.
- Emphasis on realism and specificity.
WORKS AND AUTHORS:
- "Robinson Crusoe" (Daniel Defoe) /
- "Gulliver's Travels" (Jonathan Swift) /
- "Tom Jones" (Henry Feilding) /
- Samuel Johnson
- Joseph Addison
- Richard Steele -
Period: to
THE AUGUSTAN AGE
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a poet, was prolific at this time and noted for challenging stereotypically female roles.
AUTHORS:
- Alexander Pope.
- Jonathan Swift.
- Daniel Defoe. -
AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Concerns:
- Justice.
- Politics.
- Science.
- Technological progress.
- Education. -
Period: to
AGE OF SENSIBILITY
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Also called "the Age of Johnson".
- Ideas that were championed: neoclassicism, a critical and literary mode, and the Enlightenment (a particular worldview shared by many intellectuals).
NOTABLE FIGURES:
- Edmund Burke.
- Edward Gibbon.
- Hester Lynch Thrale.
- James Boswell.
- Samuel Johnson.
NOVELISTS:
- Henry Fielding.
- Samuel Richardson.
- Tobias Smollett.
- Laurence Sterne.
POETS:
- William Cowper.
- Thomas Percy. -
Period: to
ROMANTIC
EVENTS:
- French revolution.
- Publication year for William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's book Lyrical Ballads (1798).
NOTABLE FIGURES:
- Wordsworth.
- Coleridge.
- William Blake.
- Lord Byron.
- John Keats.
- Charles Lamb.
- Mary Wollstonecraft.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley.
- Thomas De Quincey.
- Jane Austen.
- Mary Shelley.
WORKS:
- "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (Mary Wollstonecraft) /1792
- "Pride and Prejudice" (Jane Austen) /1813
- "The Last Leaf" (Oliver W. Holmes) / 1831 -
Period: to
GOTHIC ERA
Gothic literature is a genre that emerged as one of the eeriest forms of Dark Romanticism in the late 1700s, a literary genre that emerged as a part of the larger Romanticism movement. Dark Romanticism is characterized by expressions of terror, gruesome narratives, supernatural elements, and dark, picturesque scenery. This fictional genre encompasses many different elements and has undergone a series of revivals since its inception.
WRITERS:
- Matthew Lewis.
- Anne Radcliffe.
- William Beckford. -
Period: to
VICTORIAN
CHARACTERISTICS:
- It was named for the reign of Queen Victoria.
- Great social, reñigious, intellectual, and economic issues, heralded by the passage of the Reform Bill, which expanded voting rights.
POETS:
- Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Christina Rossetti
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Matthew Arnold
WORKS:
- "A Christmas' Carol" (Charles Dickens) /1843
- "The Time Machine" (H. G. Wells) / 1895
- "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (Frank Baum) / 1900 -
Period: to
EDWARDIAN PERIOD
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Named for King Edward VII.
- It covers the period between Victoria's death and the outbreak of World War I.
CLASSIC NOVELISTS:
- Joseph Conrad
- Ford Madox Ford
- Rudyard Kipling
- H. G. Wells
- Henry James
NOTABLE POETS:
- Alfred Noyes
- William Butler Yeats
DRAMATISTS:
- James Barrie
- George Barnard Shaw
- John Galsworthy
WORKS:
- "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" (Beatrix Potter) / 1901
- "Anne of Green Gables" (Lucy Maud Montgomery) / 1908 -
Period: to
MODERN LITERATURE
CHARACTERISTICS:
- Works written after the start of WWI
- Bold experimentation
- Subject matter, style, and form, encompassing narrative, verse and drama.
- Criticism
NOTABLE WRITERS:
- James Joyce
- Virginia Woolf
- Aldous Huxley
- D. H. Lawrence
- Joseph Conrad
- Dorothy Richardson
- Graham Greene
- E. M. Forster
- Doris Lessing
- W. B. Yeats
- T. S. Eliot
- W. H. Auden
- Seamus Heaney
- Wilfred Owens
- Dylan Thomas
- Robert Grawes
- Tom Stoppard
- George B. Shaw
- Samuel Beckett -
Period: to
GEORGIAN PERIOD
CHARACTERISTICS:
- It refers to the reign of George V (1910 - 1936)
- Edward Marsh
GEORGIAN POETS:
- Ralph Hodgson
- John Masefield
- W. H. Dowies
- Rupert Brooke
THEMES AND SUBJECT MATTER:
- Rural or pastoral.
- Delicately and traditionally
WORKS:
- "1914 an Other Poems" (Rupert Brooke) / 1915
- "Mrs. Dalloway" (Virginia Woolf) / 1925
- "My Life and Loves" (Frank Harris) / 1928 -
Period: to
POST MODERNS
CHARACTERISTICS:
- It begins about the time that World War II ended.
- Poststructuralist literary theory and criticism were developed.
- Modernists introduced important stylistic innovations: stream of consciousness, unreliable narrator and psychology.
NOTABLE WORKS:
- "Narnia in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" (C. W. Lewis) / 1950
- "I know why the caged bird sings" (Maya Angelou) / 1979
- "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone" (J. K. Rowling) / 1997 -
Period: to
CONTEMPORARY
Works of contemporary literature reflect a society's social and/or political viewpoints, shown through realistic characters, connections to current events, and socioeconomic messages. The writers are looking for trends that illuminate societal strengths and weaknesses to remind society of lessons they should learn and questions they should ask.
WORKS:
-"The Hunger Games" (Suzanne Collins) / 2010
- "Cormoran Strikes" (Robert Galbraith) / 2013 - present
