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Period: 450 to 1066
Old English (Anglo-Saxon)
Roman armies withdrew from Britain allowing two Germanic tribes, the Angles and the Saxons to occupy rapidly the land. Hundreds of literary pieces were written. Despite Latin was the official language, Old English became popular (Anglo-Saxons used it) to write heroic stories. Example: Beowulf, epic poem about the triumph and death of Beowulf, a warrior who defeated a monster named Grendel under the Denmark King's request and became the King of Gates. Finally he was killed by a dragon. -
Period: 1066 to 1500
Middle English Period
Transition in language and culture, resulting in early modern English. Writings were religious and secular romances, poetries and lyrics. Norman conquest caused a mixture of norman dialect with the anglo-saxon. Known authors: Chaucer, Thomas Malory, and Robert Henryson. Notable works: "Piers Plowman" and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. -
Period: 1500 to
The Renaissance
Divided into the Elizabethan Age (1558–1603), the Jacobean Age (1603–1625), the Caroline Age (1625–1649), and the Commonwealth Period (1649–1660). Exponents: Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, of course, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Robert Burton, and George Herbert. During the Commonwealth period, after the English Civil Warm, a Puritan led the Parliament, giving place to political writings, drama lessening and prose proliferation. -
Period: to
The Neoclassical Period
Divided into: The Restoration (1660–1700), The Augustan Age (1700–1745), and The Age of Sensibility (1745–1785). Characteristics: materialism; social needs were more important than individuals; imitation of greek and roman classic literature. Restoration comedies, satires, essays, became common, Exponents: Samuel Butler, Daniel Defoe, and John Locke, Jonathan Swift. Writtings: An Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope, An Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), John Dryden. -
Period: to
The Romantic Period
Characteristics: Influence of French Revolution; political concerns in poems; ideal of freedom; new role of individual thought and personal feelings; from imitation of neocalassical era to creativity; Exponents: Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley. Pieces: An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); Songs of Innocence (1789); Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) and The Prelude. -
Period: to
The Victorian Period
Named for the reign of Queen Victoria. Britain emerges from a long war with France as the world’s predominant economy; growth of the British Empire. Characteristics: Introspection; realism, immoralism, nostalgia, novels age: intellectual controversy. Exponents: Christina Rossetti,Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot. Works: Thomas Carlyle’s essays “Signs of the Times” (1829) and “Characteristics” (1831); Richard Henry Horne’s "New Spirit of the Age" in 1844. -
Period: to
The Edwardian and Georgian Period
The themes tended to be rural, treated delicately rather than with passion (like happened in the previous periods). This period corresponds Edward VII and George V reigns, and the outbreak of World War I. classic novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells poets such as Alfred Noyes and William Butler Yeats, as well as dramatists such as James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy. -
Period: to
The Modern Period
Characteristics: experimentation and individualism; World War 1 and 2 and industrial development influence; evolution against the traditional thoughts of the Victorian era; psycho-analysis and irrational philosophy. exponents: James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Oscar Wilde. Writtings:David Herbert Lawrence (1930) – Sons and Lovers; James Joyce (1941) Ulysses; Thomas Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral" (1935), Virginia Woolf's "The Waves"(1931) -
Period: to
Postmodernism and Contemporary
This period begins when World War II ended. Characteristics: metafiction, unreliable narration, irony, simple language & complex structure, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, thematizing historical and political issues, poststructuralist literary theory and criticism. JRR Tolkien's "The lord of the Rings"(1955), Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach"(1961), AS Byatt's "Shadow of a Sun"(1964), Irvine Welsh's Trainsppoting(1993); JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Phylosopher's Stone(1997)