English Literature

By Mabel Vanegas
  • 1200 BCE

    THE CLASSICAL PERIOD

    THE CLASSICAL PERIOD
    The classical period was a golden age for literature and the arts, take it from Shmoop. The big writers from this period include all those Greek and Roman guys who wrote epics, like Homer of the Iliad and Odyssey fame, and the Roman poet Virgil who wrote the Aeneid. The Greek philosophers Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle called this period home, as did Greek dramatists like Euripides and Aristophanes. As for poets, Horace and Ovid were two of the most influential.
  • 1200 BCE

    Homeric or Heroic Period

    Homeric or Heroic Period
    Greek legends are 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.
  • 1200 BCE

    The classical period- Notable Literary texts:

    • Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
    • Aesop's Fable
    • Ovid's Metamorphose
    • Virgil's Aenid
    • St Jerome's Bible Compilation
  • 800 BCE

    Classical Greek Period

    Classical Greek Period
    Greek writers and philosophers such as 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 is the sophisticated period of the polis, or individual City-State, and early democracy. Some of the world's finest art, poetry, drama, architecture, and philosophy originate in Athens.
  • 200 BCE

    Classical Roman Period

    Classical Roman Period
    Greece's culture gives way to Roman power when Rome conquers Greece in 146 CE.Playwrights of this time include Plautus and Terence. After nearly 500 years as a Republic Rome slid into dictatorship under Julius Caesar and finally into a monarchial empire under Caesar Augustus in 27 CE. This later period is known as the Roman Imperial period. Roman writers included Ovid, Horace,and Virgil. Roman philosophers included Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius. Roman rhetoricians included Cicero and Quintilian.
  • 70

    Patristic Period

    Patristic Period
    Early Christian writings such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Saint Cyprian, Saint Ambrose and Saint Jerome. This is the period in which Saint Jerome first compiled the Bible, when Christianity spread across Europe, and the Roman Empire suffered its dying convulsions. In this period, barbarians attack Rome in 410 AD and the city finally falls to them completely in 455 CE.
  • 423

    The Old English (Anglo-saxon) Period

    The Old English (Anglo-saxon) Period
    The so-called "Dark Ages" occur when Rome falls and barbarian tribes move into Europe.
    Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Caedmon's Hymn poem are three of the best known works.
  • 455

    THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD

    THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
    Medieval literature is defined broadly as any work written in Latin or the vernacular between c. 476-1500 CE, including philosophy, religious treatises, legal texts, as well as works of the imagination. More narrowly, however, the term applies to literary works of poetry, drama, romance, epic prose, and histories written in the vernacular.
  • 455

    The medieval period- Notable Literary texts:

    • Beowulf
    • Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
    • Sir Gawain and the green Knight
    • Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur
  • 800

    - The Carolingian Renaissance

    - The Carolingian Renaissance
    In central Europe, texts include early medieval grammars, encyclopedias, etc. In northern Europe, this time period marks the setting of Viking sagas.
    Charlemagne facilitated an intellectual and cultural golden age during his reign that historians call the Carolingian Renaissance—after the Carolingian dynasty, to which he belonged.
  • 1066

    The Middle English Period

    The Middle English Period
    In 1066, Norman French armies invade and conquer England under William I. This spells the end of the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and the emergence of the a Twelfth Century Renaissance, French chivalric romances--such as works by Chretien de Troyes--and French fables--such as the works of Marie de France and Jeun de Meun--spread in popularity. Abelard and other humanists produce great scholastic and theological works.
  • 1485

    THE RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

    THE RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION
    (1510) Erasmus and Tomas More take the northen renaissance in the direction of Christian Humanism.
    (1590) English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene.
    (1601) Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillucion of a less confident age.
  • 1485

    The renaissance and reformation - Notable writers/works

    • William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Edmun Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh and Ben Jonson.
    • John Donne, Francis Bacon and Thomas Middleton.
    • John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

  • THE NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD

    THE NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD
    "Neoclassical" refers to the increased influence of Classical literature upon these centuries. The Neoclassical Period is also called the "Enlightenment" due to the increased reverence for logic and disdain for superstition. The period is marked by the rise of Deism, intellectual backlash against earlier Puritanism, and America's revolution against England.

  • - Restoration Period:

    - Restoration Period:
    This period marks the British king's restoration to the throne after a long period of Puritan domination in England. It symptoms include the dominance of French and Classical influences on poetry and drama. Sample writers include John Dryden, John Lock, Sir William Temple, and Samuel Pepys, and Aphra Behn in England. Abroad, representative authors from France include Jean Racine and Molière.

  • The Neoclassical Period - Notable writers/works

    • John Milton published "Paradise lost" and "Paradise Regained"
    • John Dryden, John Wilmot 2nd Earl of Rochester, and John Locke.
    • Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Daniel Defoe.
    • Samuel Johnson

  • - The Augustan Age

    - The Augustan Age
    This period is marked by the imitation of Virgil and Horace's literature in English letters. The principle English writers include Addison, Steele, Swift, and Alexander Pope. Abroad, Voltaire is the dominant French writer.

  • - The Age of Johnson

    - The Age of Johnson
    This period marks the transition toward the upcoming Romanticism though the period is still largely neoclassical. Major writers include Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and Edward Gibbon who represent the Neoclassical tendencies, while writers like Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Cowper, and Crabbe show movement away from the Neoclassical ideal.

  • THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

    THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
    This period produced authors who wrote about life, love and nature. Many of these authors found the world to be disappointing and had a melancholy bent to their works. John Keats is possibly the most famous author of this period. And William Wordsworth is also a key figure, with the notable poem "The world is too much with us, late and soon,"

  • The Romantic Period - Notable writers

    • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    • William Wordsworth
    • Jane Austen
    • Lord Byron

  • American Renaissance

    American Renaissance
    • Major Features: expression of national spirit and utilization of native dialect, history landscape and character
    • Notable writers: Emily Dickenson, Whalt Whitman, Herman Millvelle, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  • THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

    THE VICTORIAN PERIOD
    Writing during the period of Queen Victoria's reign includes sentimental novels. British writers as Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen Pre- Raphaelites like the Rossettis, William Morris, idealize and long for the morality of the medieval. The end of the Victorian Period marked by intellectual movements of Asceticism and "the Decadence" in writings of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.

  • The Victorian Period - Notable writers

    • Alfred Lord Tennyson
    • Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
    • Matthew Arnold
    • Charles Dickens
    • Charlotte Brontë
    • George Eliot
    • Thomas Hardy
    • Víctor Hugo

  • Transcendentalism

    Transcendentalism
    • Major Features: philosophy or system of thought based on the idea tht humans are essentially good, that humanity's greatest truths may be formulated through insight rather than logic, and that there is essential unity to all creation.
    • Notable writers: Ralph Waldo, Henry David Thoreau.

  • American Realism and Regionalism

    American Realism and Regionalism
    • Major Features: attempted to portray an accurate, detailed picture of ordinary, contemporary life.
      Character is more important that action and plot.
      Humans control their destinies.
      Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail.
      Events will usually be plausible.
      Class is important.
      Diction is natural vernacular.
      The use of symbolism is controlled and limited.
    • Notable writers: Mark Twain: The adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

  • THE MODERN PERIOD

    THE MODERN PERIOD
    In Britain, modernist writers include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, In America, the modernist period includes Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen, and Flannery O'Connor as well as the famous writers of The Lost Generation (also called the writers of The Jazz Age) such as Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. "The Harlem Renaissance" marks the rise of black writers such as Baldwin and Ellison.

  • The Lost Generation

    The Lost Generation
    Generation of writers, many of them were soldiers, who published in the years folloging WW1. -Notable writers: Novelist Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  • Harlem Renaissance

    Harlem Renaissance
    • An explosion of African-American literature, art and music.
    • it marks the rise of black writers such as Baldwin and Ellison.
    • This is the time when African-American received formal education.

  • THE POSTMODERN PERIOD

    THE POSTMODERN PERIOD
    Eliot, Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard,Fowles,Calvino, Ginsberg,Pynchon and other modern writers, poets, and playwrights experiment with metafiction and fragmented poetry. Multiculturalism leads to increasing canonization of non-Caucasian writers such as Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neal Hurston. Magic Realists such as Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie flourish with surrealistic writings embroidered in the conventions of realism

  • Beat Generation

    Beat Generation
    • A new cultural and literaly movement staked its claim on the nation's consciousness.
    • The Beat Generation wa a never a large movement in terms of sheer numbers, but in influence and cultural status, they were more visible than any other competing aesthetic.

  • Postcolonial Literature

    Postcolonial Literature
    Postcolonialism, the historical period or satte of affairs representing the aftermath of Wersten colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of imperialism.

  • Confessional poetry

    Confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal.
    Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression, and relationships were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner

  • The Contemporary Period

    The Contemporary Period
    (2010) Mockingjay completes Suzanne Collins' trilogy, The hunger Games.
    (2013) J.K Rowling (under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith) stars Cormoran Strike, a series of crime fiction novels.