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Period: 1200 BCE to 450 BCE
The Classical Period
(1200 BCE-455 BCE)
Homeric or Heroic Period (1200-800 BCE)
Classical Greek Period (800-200 BCE)
Classical Roman Period (200 BCE-455 BCE)
Patristic Period (c.70 CE-455 CE) -
1199 BCE
Homeric or Heroic Period
(1200-800 BCE)
Greek legends were passed along orally, including Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. This is a chaotic period of warrior princes, wandering sea traders, and fierce pirates. -
800 BCE
Classical Greek Period
(800-200 BCE)
Greek writers, playwrights, and philosophers include Gorgias, Aesop, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Euripides, and Sophocles. The fifth century (499-400 BCE) in particular is renowned as The Golden Age of Greece. This was the sophisticated era of the polis, or individual City-State, and early democracy. Some of the world's finest art, poetry, drama, architecture, and philosophy originated in Athens. -
200 BCE
Classical Roman Period
(200 BCE-455 BCE)
Greece's culture gave way to Roman power when Rome conquered Greece in 146 CE. The Roman Republic was traditionally founded in 509 BCE, but it was limited in size until later. Playwrights of this time include Plautus and Terence. After nearly 500 years as a Republic, Rome slid into a dictatorship under Julius Caesar and finally into a monarchial empire under Caesar Augustus in 27 CE. Roman writers include Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. -
70
Patristic Period
c.70 CE-455 CE)
Early Christian writers include Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Saint Cyprian, Saint Ambrose and Saint Jerome. This is the period when Saint Jerome first compiled the Bible, Christianity spread across Europe, and the Roman Empire suffered its dying convulsions. In this period, barbarians attacked Rome in 410 CE, and the city finally fell to them completely in 455 CE. -
423
The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period
(423-1066 CE)
The so-called "Dark Ages" (455 CE -799 CE) occurred after Rome fell and barbarian tribes moved into Europe. Franks, Ostrogoths, Lombards, and Goths settled in the ruins of Europe, and the Angles, Saxons migrated to Britain displacing native Celts into Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Early Old English poems such as Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer originated sometime late in the Anglo-Saxon period. -
Period: 455 to 1485
The Medieval Period
(455 CE-1485 CE)
The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period
(423-1066 CE)
The Middle English Period (c.1066-1450 CE) -
1066
The Middle English Period
(c.1066-1450 CE)
In 1066, Norman French armies invaded and conquered England under William I. This marks the end of the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and the emergence of the Twelfth Century Renaissance (c. 1100-1200 CE). -
Period: 1485 to
The Renaissance and Reformation
(1485-1660 CE)
Early Tudor Period (1485-1558)
Elizabethan Period (1558-1603)
Jacobean Period(1603-1625)
Caroline Age (1625-1649)
Commonwealth Period/
Puritan Interregnum(1649-1660) -
1486
Early Tudor Period
(1486-1558)
The War of the Roses ended in England with Henry Tudor (Henry VII) claiming the throne. Martin Luther's split with Rome marks the emergence of Protestantism, followed by Henry VIII's Anglican schism, which created the first Protestant church in England. Edmund Spenser is a sample poet. -
1558
Elizabethan Period
(1558-1603)
Queen Elizabeth saved England from both Spanish invasion and internal squabbles at home. Her reign is marked by the early works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, and Sidney. -
Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, W.
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Jacobean Period
(1603-1625)
Shakespeare's later work include Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. -
Caroline Age
(1625-1649)
John Milton, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, the "Sons of Ben" and others wrote during the reign of Charles I and his Cavaliers. -
Commonwealth Period
(1649-1660)
Under Cromwell's Puritan dictatorship, John Milton continued to write, but we also find writers like Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Browne. -
Period: to
The Enlightenment (Neoclassical) Period
Restoration Period (1660-1700)
The Augustan Age (1700-1750)
The Age of Johnson (1750-1790) -
Restoration Period
(1660-1700)
This period marks the British king's restoration to the throne after a long period of Puritan domination in England. Its symptoms include the dominance of French and Classical influences on poetry and drama. Sample writers include John Dryden, John Locke, Sir William Temple, and Samuel Pepys, and Aphra Behn in England. Abroad, representative authors include Jean Racine and Molière. -
The Augustan Age
(1700-1750)
This period is marked by the imitation of Virgil and Horace's literature in English letters. The principal English writers include Addison, Steele, Swift, and Alexander Pope. Abroad, Voltaire was the dominant French writer. -
The Age of Johnson
(1750-1790)
This period marks the transition toward the upcoming Romanticism though the period is still largely Neoclassical. Major writers include Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and Gibbon who represent Neoclassical tendencies, while writers like Robert Burns, Cowper, and Crabbe show movement away from the Neoclassical ideal. In America, this period is called the Colonial Period. It includes colonial and revolutionary writers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. -
Period: to
The Romantic Period
(1790-1830 CE)
Romantic poets & Gothic writings -
Pride and prejudice Austen, J
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Romantic poets & Gothic writings
Romantic poets wrote about nature, imagination, and individuality in England. Some Romantics include Coleridge, Blake, Keats, and Shelley in Britain and Johann von Goethe in Germany. Jane Austen also wrote at this time, though she is typically not categorized with the male Romantic poets. In America, this period is mirrored in the Transcendental Period from about 1830-1850. Transcendentalists include Emerson and Thoreau. -
Period: to
The Victorian Period and the 19th Century
(1832-1901 CE)
Sentimental Novels & Intellectual Movements
like Aestheticism and the Decadence. -
Sentimental Novels & Intellectual Movements like Aestheticism and the Decadence.
Writings from the period of Queen Victoria's reign include sentimental novels. British writers include Elizabeth Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and the Brontë sisters. Pre-Raphaelites, like the Rossetti siblings and William Morris, idealize and long for the morality of the medieval world. -
Period: to
The Modern Period
(1914-1945 CE)
Modernist Writers, Realism, etc. -
1914 and other poems Brooke. R
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Modernist Writers, Realism, etc.
(1914-1945 CE)
In Britain, modernist writers include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Wilfred Owen. In America, the modernist period includes Robert Frost and Flannery O'Connor as well as the famous writers of The Lost Generation (also called the writers of The Jazz Age, 1914-1929) such as Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. -
Period: to
The Postmodern Period
(1945-onward)
Metafiction, Multiculturalism, Magic Poetry, etc. -
Metafiction, Multiculturalism, Magic Poetry, etc.
VIII. The Postmodern Period (1945 - onward)
T.S. Eliot's Love Song for J. Alfred PrufrockT. S. Eliot, Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard, Fowles, Calvino, Ginsberg, Pynchon, and other modern writers, poets, and playwrights experimented with metafiction and fragmented poetry. Multiculturalism led to the increasing canonization of non-Caucasian writers such as Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neal Hurston. -
The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated.
