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450
Old English 450 - 1066
Also known as Anglo-Saxon Literature, encloses de surviving literature written in Old English in Anglo - Saxon England. This works include genres such as epic poetry, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles and riddles.
Authors and Literary Works
- The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles -Anonymous - 9th Century
- The Wanderer - Anonymous - 10th Century
- Beowulf - Anonymous - 975 - 1025 -
1066
Middle English 1066 - 1500
After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. French became the standard language. From then until the 12th Century, Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into Middle English.
Authors and literary works
- Geoffrey Chaucer - The House of Fame 1374
- Thomas Malory - Le Morte D'Arthur - 15th Century
- Julian of Norwich - Revelations of the Divine Love, 1393 -
1500
English Renaissance 1500 - 1660
This was a cultural and artistic movement in England. It is divided into three main periods:
Elizabethan period (1558–1603)
Jacobean period (1603–1625)
Late Renaissance (1625–1660)
Authors and Literary works:
- William Shakespeare - The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599
- Thomas Sackville - Play - Gordobuc - 1561
- Thomas Kyd - The Spanish tragedy - 1582 - 1592 -
Restoration Age 1660 - 1700
The name 'restoration' comes from the crowning of Charles II, which marks the restoring of the traditional English monarchical form of government following a short period of rule by a handful of republican governments. The writings of this time are both innovative and varied.
Authors and their literary works
- John Milton - L'Allegro - 1631
- John Dryden - MacFecknoe - 1682
- William Congreve - The Way of the World - 1700 -
18th Century 1700 -1798
The literature of this period reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century. It is divided between the Augustan literature (1700–1750) and the Age of Sensibility (1750–1798).
Authors and their literary works:
- Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe - 1719
- Samuel Johnson - Virtue Rewarded - 1740
- James Thomson - Night Thoughts - 1742 -
Romanticism 1798 - 1837
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Romanticism arrived later in other parts of the English-speaking world. Romanticism may be seen in part as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.
Authors and their literary works:
- William Blake - Songs of Innocence - 1789
- Thomas de Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - 1821
- Mary Shelley - Frankenstein - 1818 -
Victorian Literature 1837 - 1901
It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in English. Women played an important part in this rising popularity both as authors and as readers.
Authors and their literary works
- Anne Bronte - The Tenant of wildfell Hall - 1848
- William Makepeace - Vanity Fair - 1847
- George Elliot - Middle March - 1871 -72 -
Modernism 1901 -1922
English literary modernism developed in the early twentieth-century out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and belief in the idea of objective truth.
Authors and their literary works:
- Aldous Huxley - Dystopia Brave New World - 1932
- Virginia Woolf - To the lighthouse - 1927
- John Galsworthy - The Forsyte Saga - 1906 - 21 -
Post - Modernism 1940 - 2000
Though some have seen modernism ending by around 1939,[159] with regard to English literature, "When (if) modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to modernism occurred".[160] In fact a number of modernists were still living and publishing in the 1950s and 1960.
Some literary works are:
- Under the Volcano
- The Hobbit
- Harry Potter
Authors
- J.R.R. Tolkien
- J.K. Rowling
- George Orwell
