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1066
Premodern or medieval period 450 to 1066
The literature of this era was dominated by religious writings, which included poetry, theology and the life of the saints, but there were also secular works and scientific works. -
1400
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) Premodern period
He wrote in medieval English. His most famous work is the Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories of disparate genres told by a group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury. -
1476
The printing press
William Caxton introduced the printing press in England. From that moment, vernacular literature began to flourish. -
1500
The medieval period (1200-1500)
Topics related to King Arthur and his court were especially popular. The poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows much of the characteristics of the literature of this era: located in the times of the legendary Arthur, the work emphasizes the behaviors of knights with religious advances. -
1550
Early modern era or Renaissance 1486 1660
"The English Renaissance" is the term used to describe the artistic and cultural movement that existed in England. -
1560
Poems
Thomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet in England in the early 16th. Poems written for music, such as those written by Thomas Campion, became popular and printed literature began to reach many homes. At the end of the sixteenth century, English poetry was characterized by an elaborate language and its allusions to the themes of classical mythology. Among the most prominent poets of the period include Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. -
Elizabethan literature
The Elizabethan Era witnessed the flowering of literature, especially drama: producing the so-called Elizabethan theater -
Christopher Marlowe
He was born a few weeks before Shakespeare, was fascinated and terrified at the same time by the new frontiers that modern science was opening, which inspired him to write his work The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus about a scientist obsessed with knowledge and that you want to take the technological powers of man to the most extreme limits. -
Shakespeare. Elizabethan Era
The Elizabethan era had a thriving literary production, especially in the field of theater. William Shakespeare was an outstanding author of poetry and plays, surely the most relevant figure that English literature has had in its history -
Jacobean literature
The King James Bible, one of the most important translation projects in the history of England, began in 1604 and was not completed until 1611. -
Baroque poetry
In addition to metaphysical poets, the seventeenth is famous for his baroque poetry. This poetry is similar to the artistic style of the same name: elevated, epic and religious. Many of the poets who cultivated this style had a special Catholic sensitivity and wrote their poetry to support the Catholic counter-reform. -
Political literature
The Protectorate witnessed the birth of political literature.
Izaac Walton, allowed him to work on his work The Compleat Angler. First published in 1653 -
Restoration Literature 1660 to 1689
The reopening of the theaters gave the opportunity to represent satirical works on the new nobility and the growing bourgeoisie. During this period, the prose was dominated by Christian writings although it was also at this time when two genres began that dominated later periods: fiction and journalism -
Empirical science
Thomas Sprat wrote in 1667 History of the Royal Society of London and showed, in a single document, the goals of science empirical Locke emphasized the plastic nature of the social contract. -
Restoration Literature
Aphra Behn was the first female novelist and professional dramatist. The allegory of John Bunyan, The Pilgrim, is one of the most-read works of this period. -
Augustus era literature
The era of the early eighteenth century is known as the era of Augustus or neoclassical literature. -
Robinson Crusoe
The works of Alexander Pope show that the poetry of these years was very formal. The English novel was not very popular until the 18th century, although many works were very important, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe. -
The Prose
it was Jonathan Swift, whose deep and desperate perception of stupidities and the evils of human nature contrasts with the social criticism of his contemporaries. A modest proposition (1729) it reaches high peaks of terrible irony. Gulliver's Travels (1726) -
Romanticism 1789 to 1837
Privileged emotion over reason. The cult of nature, as understood today, also characterized romantic literature, as well as the primacy of individual will over social norms of behavior, the preference for the illusion of immediate experience as opposed to generalized experience, and interest in what was far in space and time. -
Poetry
The first important manifestation of romanticism was the Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lord Byron is one of the examples of a personality in a tragic struggle against society. Both in his restless life, as in poems such as The Pilgrimages of Childe Harold (1812) or Don Juan (1819) revealed a satirical spirit. -
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The author of deeper poetry. In it, he expressed his two main ideas: that the enemy was the tyranny of rulers, customs and superstitions, and that the inherent goodness of the human being would eliminate, sooner or later, the evil of the world and elevate it to the eternal kingdom of transcendental love. He wrote "The eve of Saint Agnes", "Ode to a Greek urn" and "Ode to a nightingale", -
Victorian Literature 1837 1901
A time of social transformations that forced writers to take positions on the most immediate issues. The novel became the dominant literary form during the Victorian era. -
Novels
Realism, that is, the acute observation of individual problems and social relations, was the tendency that prevailed, as can be seen in Jane Austen's novels, such as Pride and Prejudice. Dickens' novels about contemporary life, such as Oliver Twist or David Copperfield. His portraits of social ills and his ability to caricature and humor provided him with countless readers and the recognition of critics as one of the greatest novelists of all time. -
Modern literature
The sense of hopelessness of the post-World War I period in Counterpoint (1928), a work written with a technique that marks a break with respect to previous realistic narratives. -
Realistic Novels
Much more experimental and heterodox were the novels of the Irishman James Joyce. In his novel Ulysses (1922) he focuses on the events of a single day and It relates to thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. -
Violence novels 1950 to 1980
Anthony Burgess, a deep writer, became famous for his novel on youth violence, The Orange Mechanic (1962), and John Le Carré gained great popularity for his ingenious and complex spy novels, such as The Spy that emerged from the cold (1963) o The house Russia (1989). William Golding explores the evil of the human being in the allegorical Lord of the Flies (1954) -
The black genre
It was a dominant fashion in much of the narrative of the 1980s, which also focuses on the growing ambition of the declassed and the relentless capitalist individualism. Martin Amis writes with a colloquialism that refers to American novelists and produces wild satires, such as Money (1984) -
Postmodern literature
Two examples of English postmodern literature are John Fowles and Julian Barnes. Some important writers of the early 21st century are Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Will Self, Andrew Motion and Salman Rushdie.
