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Period: 456 to 1066
ANGLO SAXON PERIOD
It was fond of singing about battles, gods and their ancestral heroes. It is, however, these songs of religion, wars, and agriculture that marked the beginning of English poetry in ancient England. -
597
Christianity
Beowulf had been the most famous story until English embraced Christianity, the Anglo-Saxon poets began to write religious poetry. Therefore, the major portion of Anglo-Saxon poetry encompasses religion -
679
Anglo Saxon Prose
The Anglo-Saxons replaced Latin prose with English which observed all the rules of ordinary speech in its construction. The famous Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great, translated most of the famous Latin Chronicles in English. -
1066
The Decline of Anglo-Saxons
The Anglo-Saxon period flourished until the Norman Conquest of 1066. After the defeat of Harold, the last of Saxon kings, by William who was the Conqueror of Normandy -
Period: 1066 to 1500
The Anglo-Norman or Middle English Period
The Normans brought with them their rich French culture and language. The literature of this period comes under the category of Norman-French Literature or Anglo-French Literature. -
1071
Norman conquest
The Norman Conquest brought a radical change in English culture, law, language, and character. English became the language spoken only by the poor and powerless. -
1240
Anglo-Normand romance
Anglo-Norman literature was well provided with romances brought By French Literature.Thomas wrote a courtly version of the Tristan story, which survived in scattered fragments and was used by Gottfried von Strassburg in Tristan und Isolde -
1350
Secular Literature
Literatura was Religious in nature, however secular literature began to rise. writers: Chaucer, Maly and Henryson. -
1400
Decline Of middle English period
The period from 1400 to the Renaissance was bereft of quality literature. The poets of that time period produced little work and merely imitated Chaucer and his contemporaries.
The Age of Chaucer was followed by The Renaissance Period also known as the Elizabethan Period. It took over 100 years. -
1450
The Anglo Normand Poets
Philippe de Thaun, Reginald of Canterbury, William Langland, Chaucer. -
Period: 1500 to
The Renaissance
also known as the Elizabethan Period or the Age of Shakespeare. It is, in fact, the ‘golden age’ in the history of English literature.
the darkness of the middle ages was replaced by the enlightenment of the human mind with the ‘Revival of Learning’, which the Renaissance prompted. -
1558
The Elizabeth age (1558-1603)
The Elizabethan age saw the flowering of poetry (the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, dramatic blank verse), was a golden age of drama (especially for the plays of Shakespeare), and inspired a wide variety of splendid prose (from historical chronicles, versions of the Holy Scriptures, pamphlets, and literary criticism to the first English novels). -
The Jacobean Age (1603-1625)
Jacobean literature, body of works written during the reign of James I of England (1603–25). The successor to Elizabethan literature, Jacobean literature was often dark in mood, questioning the stability of the social order; some of William Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies may date from the beginning of the period, and other dramatists, including John Webster, were often preoccupied with the problem of evil -
The Caroline age (1625-1649)
Authors whose careers are closely associated with the Caroline Age include prose writer Sir Thomas Browne and the royalist Cavalier poets — Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling — who wrote lyrics about love, women, and gallantry. Other authors associated with the Caroline Age include Robert Burton, author of Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), who began to write during the preceding Jacobean Age -
the Commonwealth Period (1649–1660)
The Commonwealth Age began with the beheading of King Charles I in 1649 and ended with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy via the coronation of Charles II in 1660.
Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Taylor, Izaac Walton, and John Milton, whose “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” (1649) attempted to justify the execution of Charles I -
The restoration
In the Restoration Age, in poetry, the classical forms of the heroic couplet and the ode became popular.
Major works include Milton's Paradise Lost. Daniel Defoe, John Dryden,Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope. -
Period: to
The Neoclassical Period
The Neoclassical period is also subdivided into ages, including The Restoration (1660–1700), The Augustan Age (1700–1745), and The Age of Sensibility (1745–1785).
In England, Neoclassicism flourished roughly between 1660, when the Stuarts returned to the throne, and the 1798 publication of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, with its theoretical preface and collection of poems that came to be seen as heralding the beginning of the Romantic Age. -
The Augustan age
Augustan literature (sometimes referred to misleadingly as Georgian literature) is a style of British literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the first half of the 18th century and ending in the 1740s, with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively.
The literature of the 18th century, particularly the early 18th century, was very political. -
The Age of Sensibility
The period in British literature between roughly 1740 and 1800 is sometimes called “the Age of
Sensibility,” in recognition of the high value that many Britons came to place on explorations of
feeling and emotion in literature and the other arts. -
Period: to
The Romantic Period
The Romantic Period began roughly around 1798 and lasted until 1837. The political and economic atmosphere at the time heavily influenced this period, with many writers finding inspiration from the French Revolution. There was a lot of social change during this period. -
The start of romanticism
Robert Burns is considered the pioneer of the Romantic Movement. William Blake was one of the earliest Romantic Period writers. Blake believed in spiritual and political freedom and often wrote about these themes -
Poetry
Scholars say that the Romantic Period began with the publishing of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This was one of the first collections of poems that strayed from the more formal poetic diction of the Neoclassical Period. -
Gothic era.
This era includes the works of such juggernauts as Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. -
Period: to
The Victorian Period (1832–1901)
This period is named for the reign of Queen Victoria, who ascended to the throne in 1837, and it lasts until her death in 1901. -
Early Victorian Period
The Earlier Victorian Period was, in fact, dominated by middle class supremacy, the age of ‘laissez-fair’ or free trade, and of unrestricted competition. The great writers of this period were Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, -
Later Victorian Period
The most prominent writers of that period were Christiana Rossetti, Charles Swinburne, George Eliot, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Pater and others.
inclination towards Classicism was due its rational approach to the problems of life, deeply moral attitude, and a search for stability and balance. -
Period: to
The Edwardian Period
The Edwardian era or Edwardian period of British history spanned the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910, and is sometimes expanded to the start of the First World War.
this was a period when a great number of novels and short stories were being published, and a significant distinction between "highbrow" literature and popular fiction emerged. -
Authors
In fiction, some of the best-known names are J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, John Galsworthy, Kenneth Grahame, M. R. James, Rudyard Kipling, A. A. Milne, E. Nesbit, Beatrix Potter, Saki, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and P. G. Wodehouse -
Period: to
The Georgian Period (1910–1936)
The Georgian period usually refers to the reign of George V (1910–1936) but sometimes also includes the reigns of the four successive Georges from 1714–1830.
Georgian poetry today is typically considered to be the works of minor poets anthologized by Edward Marsh. The themes and subject matter tended to be rural or pastoral in nature -
Period: to
The Modern Period (1901-1945)
From the beginning of the 20th Century started the Modern Period in English literature. The most significant feature of Modern literature was that it opposed the general attitude of Victorian writers and people to life and its problems. During the first decade of the 20th Century, the young people regarded the Victorian age as hypocritical, and the Victorian ideals as superficial, mean and stupid. -
Modern Poetry
Modern poetry followed an entirely different tradition from the Romantic and Victorian tradition of poetry. T. S. Eliot is the chief representative of modern poetry. -
Modern Drama
Besides the comedy of manners and ideas, another type of drama evolved in England under the influence of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Its originators were Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats. -
Modern Novel
The modern novelists who dominated the earlier part of the 20th Century were H. G. Bells, Arnold Bennett, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy and E. M. Foster. From the beginning of World War I new experiments were made in the field of literature on account of the new forces which resulted from war and broke the old tradition -
Period: to
The Postmodern Period (1945–?)
After World War II, new trends appeared in English literature. Although poetry was the most memorable form to come out of World War I, the novel was the form which told the stories of World War II. This was because mass media, cinema, newspapers, and radio had changed the way of information and entertainment. -
The Novel from 1950s and 1960s
Certainly, each decade in the history of English literature introduced different ways of writing. In the 1950s, a new generation of writers appeared, with new subjects and issues.
Colin Wilson, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, William Golding.