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English literature overview - Dayana Carreño

By Dayanaco
  • 1200 BCE

    The Homeric or Heroic Period (1200-800BCE)

    The Homeric or Heroic Period (1200-800BCE)
    Topics:
    - Poems of Greek mythology
    - Unrhymed dactylic hexameter
    - Epic themes
    - Similes
    - Intervention of divine forces
    - Heroism
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Homer: ("The Iliad" and "The Odyssey")
    /
    He then influenced future writers such as John Milton, Virgil, Chaucer, and Alexander Pope.
  • Period: 1200 BCE to 455 BCE

    The Classical Period

    1. Homeric or Heroic Period
    2. Classical Greek Period
    3. Classical Roman Period
    4. Patristic Period / Features:
    5. Oral tradition
    6. Myths
    7. Fundamental Religious texts
    8. Often centered on royalty
  • 800 BCE

    The Classical Greek Period (800-200 BCE)

    The Classical Greek Period (800-200 BCE)
    After the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean lands and then of the Byzantine Empire.
    /
    Topics:
    - Poetry intended to be sung or recited
    - Myth
    - Elegy
    - Choral lyric
    - Comedy
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Hesiod in the Archaic period: ("Theogony" - about myths of gods, and "Works and Days" - about peasant life)
    - Euripides in the Classical period: (Alcestis)
    - Aristotle and Plato formed the basis of Western philosophy.
  • 200 BCE

    The Classical Roman Period (200BCE-455CE)

    The Classical Roman Period (200BCE-455CE)
    Latin literature
    /
    Topics:
    - Comedy
    - Tragedy
    - Fabula
    - Drama
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Livius Andronicus: (Translation of the "Odyssey")
    - Gnaeus Naevius ("Romulus" and "Clastidium")
    - Plautus: ("Bacchides", "Captivi", and "Amphitruo")
    - Cicero: (Edited the "De rerum natura" - "The nature of things" - of the philosophical poet Lucretius)
  • 70

    The Patristic Period (C. 70CE-455CE)

    The Patristic Period (C. 70CE-455CE)
    Topics:
    - Christianity - Old Testament
    - Orthodox faith
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Origen - the most important theologian and biblical scholar of the early Greek church: (the "Greek Old Testament" and the "Hexapla" - a synopsis of Old Testament versions from Hebrew and a transliteration, the Septuagint, the versions of the translator Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion)
    - The so-called Apostolic Fathers: ("Teaching of the Twelve Apostles", "Letter of Barnabas")
    - St. Jerome: Bible compilation
  • 450

    The Old English period (Anglo-Saxon) (450-1066)

    The Old English period (Anglo-Saxon) (450-1066)
    Topics: Translation (legal, medical, or religious texts)

    /
    Authors:
    - Caedmon
    - Cynewulf
    /
    Works: Beowulf (longest Old English poem)
    /
    Dialects: Northumbrian, Kentish, West Saxon, and Mercian.
  • Period: 455 to 1485

    The Medieval Period

    Includes:
    1. The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period
    2. The Middle English Period
    /
    Major Features:
    - Christian Morality
    - Chivalry Code
  • 1066

    The Middle English period (1066-1500)

    The Middle English period (1066-1500)
    Topics:
    - Chivalry code
    - Allegorical fable
    - Verse
    - Secular lyrics
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Chaucer: (Canterbury Tales - He wrote 24 out of the 100 he intended to).
    - Thomas Malory: (Morte d'Arthur - English account of the French tales of King Arthur).
    - Robert Henryson: (The moral Fabilllis - 13 fables with a )
    - William Langland "Will": (Piers Plowman - 22 dream visions on how he could live a good Christian life)
    - Unknown: (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)
    /
    Church influenced cultural life.
  • Period: 1500 to

    The Renaissance period

    Includes four periods:
    1. The Elizabethan Age
    2. The Jacobean Age
    3. The Caroline Age
    4. The Commonwealth Period
    /
    Topics:
    - Comedy
    - Drama
    - Skepticism
  • 1558

    The Elizabethan Age (1558-1603)

    The Elizabethan Age (1558-1603)
    Topics:
    - Poetry
    - Education
    - Prose
    - Theology (Anglican traditions)
    - Drama
    - Atheism
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Sir Philip Sidney: (The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Certain Sonets, and The Lady of May)
    - Edmund Spenser: (poem "The Faerie Queene)
    - Roger Ascham: (Toxophilus "Lover of the Bow", and The Scholemaster)
    - Richard Hooker: (Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie)
    - Christopher Marlowe: (Tamburlaine the Great - the blank verse)
    - William Shakespeare: (Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet)
  • Period: to

    The Enlightnement (Neoclassical) Period

    1. The Restoration
    2. The Augustan Age
    3. The Age of Sensibility of Johnson
    /
    Topics:
    - Materialism and Empirical Science
    - Inspired by the classical art culture of ancient Greece and Rome
    - Order, accuracy, and structure (control)
    - Restoration of drama

  • The Jacobean Age (1603-1625)

    The Jacobean Age (1603-1625)
    Topics:
    - Dark
    - Question stability of social order
    - Drama
    - Poetry
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - John Webster (preoccupied with the problem of evil)
    - Ben Jonson (acid satire in era's comedy)
    - Francis Beaumont
    - John Fletcher
    - Jonson and the Cavalier poets

  • The Caroline Era (1625-1649)

    The Caroline Era (1625-1649)
    Named for king Charles I.
    /
    Topics:
    - Metaphysical, Cavalier, and Puritan poetry
    - classic, oppressive opinion on women
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Robert Herrick: (To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time)
    - John Donne: ("The Flea", and "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning")
    - John Milton: (Paradise Lost - poem about Satan's fall from Heaven and attempted rebellion against God)
    - Anne Bradstreet: (To My Dear and Loving Husband - a poem about her love for her husband)

  • The Commonwealth Period (1649-1660)

    The Commonwealth Period (1649-1660)
    Topics:
    - Prose and nondramatic poetry
    - Satyre
    - Metaphysical poetry
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Thomas Hobbes: (De Corpore - one of his scientific works. He also wrote about politics and psychology)
    - Jeremy Taylor
    - Izaac Walton
    - Abraham Cowley: ("Poeticall Blossomes" - a work in his adolescence, "The Mistress", etc.)
    - Andrew Marvell: (Upon Appleton House)
    - Henry Vaughan: (Silex Scintillans)

  • The Restoration (1660-1700)

    The Restoration (1660-1700)
    The Reign of William III and Mary II had begun (1689-1702)
    /
    Topics:
    - Poetry
    - Prose
    - Satire
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - John Bunyan: (Pilgrim's Progress)
    - John Dryden: (To His Sacred Majesty)
    - Samuel Butler: (Hudibras)
    - John Oldham: (The four "Satyrs upon the Jesuits")
    - John Milton (Paradise Lost)

  • The Augustan Age (1700-1745)

    The Augustan Age (1700-1745)
    Topics:
    - Poetry
    - Verse addressed to the emperor Augustus
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Virgil: (the Aeneid)
    - Horace: (Epistles, Odes, Ars poetica)
    - Sextus Propertius: (Cynthia)
    - Jonathan Swift: (Gulliver's Travels)

  • The Age of Sensibility or Johnson (1745-1785)

    The Age of Sensibility or Johnson (1745-1785)
    Topics:
    - Fiction
    - Criticism
    - Poetry
    - Not religion
    - Rhyme Authors and Works:
    • Samuel Johnson: (Dictionary of the English Language, 1755)
    • Laurance Stern: (Tristram Shandy)
    • Henry Mackenzie: (The Man of Feeling)

  • The Romantic Period (1785-1832)

    The Romantic Period (1785-1832)
    Topics:
    - Poems
    - Verse
    - Lyrics
    - Feminism
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Samuel Coleridge: (Kubla Khan - a poem inspired by a dream)
    - May Wollstonecraft: (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
    - Jane Austen: (Pride and Prejudice)
    - Oliver Wendell Holmes: (The Last Leaf - inspired by an old survivor of the Boston Tea Party)
    - Percy Bysshe Shelley: ("A Defence of Poetry", "Adonais")
    - Thomas De Quincey: ("Confessions of an English Opium-Eater", "Lake Reminiscences")
    - Lord Byron: ("The Giaour" - poems)

  • The American Renaissance (1830-1865CE)

    The American Renaissance (1830-1865CE)
    Topics:
    - National spirit
    - History, landscape, and character
    - Native dialect
    - Poems
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Emily Dickinson: (poems such as "Hope is The Thing With Feathers")
    - Whalt Whitman: ("Song of Myself", "O Captain! My Captain!")
    - Herman Melville: ("Bartleby the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno")
    - Nathaniel Hawthorne: ("Fanshawe", "Mosses from an Old Manse")

  • The Victorian Period (1832-1901)

    The Victorian Period (1832-1901)
    Topics:
    - Issues and problems of the day
    - social, economic, religious, and intellectual issues
    - Industrial revolution
    - The early feminist movement
    - Politic and social reforms
    - Charle's Darwin's theory and its impact on philosophy and religion
    - Novels
    - Fiction
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Alfred Lord Tennyson
    - Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
    - Matthew Arnold
    - Charles Dickens: (Some are "Oliver Twist" and "A Christmas Carol")
    - Charlotte Brontë
    - George Eliot
    - Thomas Hardy
    - Victor Hugo

  • The Transcendentalism (1835-1860CE)

    The Transcendentalism (1835-1860CE)
    Topics:
    - Believe that humans are essentially good and that there is unity in all creation.
    - Poems
    - Essays
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Ralph Waldo: ("Nature" - a work where he said that everything in this world is a microcosmos of the universe)
    - Henry David Thoreau: ("Natural History of Massachusetts" - the first of his outdoor essays)

  • The American Realism and Regionalism (1855-1900)

    The American Realism and Regionalism (1855-1900)
    Topics:
    - Detailed picture of ordinary, contemporary life
    - Humans are in control of their destiny
    - Symbolism is controlled and limited
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Mark Twain: (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn)

  • The Naturalism (1895-1910)

    The Naturalism (1895-1910)
    Topics:
    - Nature is an indifferent force acting on the lives of humans.
    - Scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of humans.
    - Sonnets
    - Ballads
    - Horror
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Edith Wharton: (Published some books after married such as "The Greater Inclination", and "Crucial Instances".
    - Jack London: ("The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North" - a collection of short stories)

  • The Edwardian Period (1901-1914)

    The Edwardian Period (1901-1914)
    Topics:
    - Positivism
    - Insensitivity
    - Repression and lack of humility
    - Satire
    - Narrative poem
    - Ballad
    - Imagism and futurism
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Thomas Hardy: (
    - Rudyard Kipling: (
  • Period: to

    The Modernism

    1. Edwardian Period
    2. Georgian Period

  • The Georgian Period (1910-1936)

    The Georgian Period (1910-1936)
    Topics:
    - Poems
    - Drama
    - Novels
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Yeats: (Poems such as "A Bronze Head", and "A Coat")
    - T.S. Eliot: ("The Waste Land" and "Four Quarters")
    - Dylan Thomas: (Poems such as "In Country Sleep" and "Do not go gentle into that good night")
    - Seamus Heaney: (Poems such as "Death of a Naturalist" and "Door into the Dark")
    - James Joyce: ("Dubliners" - a collection of 15 short stories)
    - Virginia Woolf: (a novel called "Melymbrosia)

  • The Modern Period (1914-1950)

    The Modern Period (1914-1950)
    Topics:
    - Individualism
    Known as "The Lost Generation".
    • Experimentation
    • Symbolism
    • Absurdity
    • Formalism and relativism / Authors and Works:
    • T.S. Eliot: poetic novelty
    • James Joyce: ("Ulysses" - represent an interior monologue)

  • The Post-Modern period (1950-2000)

    The Post-Modern period (1950-2000)
    Topics:
    - Metafiction
    - Magic poetry
    - Multiculturalism
    - Unreliable narration
    - Self-reflexivity on history and political issues
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - C.S. Lewis: ("Narnia and the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe")
    - Maya Angelou: ("I know why the caged birds sing")
    - J.K. Rowling: (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone)

  • The Contemporary Period (2000 - Present)

    The Contemporary Period (2000 - Present)
    Topics:
    - Identity
    - Racism
    - Family
    - Search for goodness in humanity
    - Flash fiction
    - Novels and poetry
    - Plays, memoirs, and autobiographies
    /
    Authors and Works:
    - Suzanne Collins: ("The Hunger Games")
    - J.K. Rowling: ("Cormoran Strike" - Series of crime fiction novels)