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1200 BCE
The Homeric or Heroic Period (1200-800BCE)
Topics:
- Poems of Greek mythology
- Unrhymed dactylic hexameter
- Epic themes
- Similes
- Intervention of divine forces
- Heroism
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Authors and Works:
- Homer: ("The Iliad" and "The Odyssey")
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He then influenced future writers such as John Milton, Virgil, Chaucer, and Alexander Pope. -
Period: 1200 BCE to 455 BCE
The Classical Period
- Homeric or Heroic Period
- Classical Greek Period
- Classical Roman Period
- Patristic Period / Features:
- Oral tradition
- Myths
- Fundamental Religious texts
- Often centered on royalty
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800 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.
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Topics:
- Poetry intended to be sung or recited
- Myth
- Elegy
- Choral lyric
- Comedy
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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)
Latin literature
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Topics:
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Fabula
- Drama
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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)
Topics:
- Christianity - Old Testament
- Orthodox faith
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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)
Topics: Translation (legal, medical, or religious texts)
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Authors:
- Caedmon
- Cynewulf
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Works: Beowulf (longest Old English poem)
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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
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Major Features:
- Christian Morality
- Chivalry Code -
1066
The Middle English period (1066-1500)
Topics:
- Chivalry code
- Allegorical fable
- Verse
- Secular lyrics
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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)
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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
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Topics:
- Comedy
- Drama
- Skepticism -
1558
The Elizabethan Age (1558-1603)
Topics:
- Poetry
- Education
- Prose
- Theology (Anglican traditions)
- Drama
- Atheism
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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
- The Restoration
- The Augustan Age
- 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)
Topics:
- Dark
- Question stability of social order
- Drama
- Poetry
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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)
Named for king Charles I.
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Topics:
- Metaphysical, Cavalier, and Puritan poetry
- classic, oppressive opinion on women
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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)
Topics:
- Prose and nondramatic poetry
- Satyre
- Metaphysical poetry
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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 Reign of William III and Mary II had begun (1689-1702)
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Topics:
- Poetry
- Prose
- Satire
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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)
Topics:
- Poetry
- Verse addressed to the emperor Augustus
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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)
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)
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The Romantic Period (1785-1832)
Topics:
- Poems
- Verse
- Lyrics
- Feminism
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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)
Topics:
- National spirit
- History, landscape, and character
- Native dialect
- Poems
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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)
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
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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)
Topics:
- Believe that humans are essentially good and that there is unity in all creation.
- Poems
- Essays
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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)
Topics:
- Detailed picture of ordinary, contemporary life
- Humans are in control of their destiny
- Symbolism is controlled and limited
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Authors and Works:
- Mark Twain: (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) -
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
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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)
Topics:
- Positivism
- Insensitivity
- Repression and lack of humility
- Satire
- Narrative poem
- Ballad
- Imagism and futurism
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Authors and Works:
- Thomas Hardy: (
- Rudyard Kipling: ( -
Period: to
The Modernism
- Edwardian Period
- Georgian Period
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The Georgian Period (1910-1936)
Topics:
- Poems
- Drama
- Novels
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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)
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)
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The Post-Modern period (1950-2000)
Topics:
- Metafiction
- Magic poetry
- Multiculturalism
- Unreliable narration
- Self-reflexivity on history and political issues
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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)
Topics:
- Identity
- Racism
- Family
- Search for goodness in humanity
- Flash fiction
- Novels and poetry
- Plays, memoirs, and autobiographies
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Authors and Works:
- Suzanne Collins: ("The Hunger Games")
- J.K. Rowling: ("Cormoran Strike" - Series of crime fiction novels)
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