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English Literature Timeline

  • 731 BCE

    700 A.C

    700 A.C
    The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
  • 1375

    1375 D.C

    1375 D.C
    The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur
  • 1604 D.C

    1604 D.C
    James I commissions the Authorized version of the Bible, which is completed by forty-seven scholars in seven years
  • Period: to

    Samuel Pepys Diary

    On the first day of the new year Samuel Pepys gets up late, eats the remains of the turkey and begins his diary, Samuel Pepys ends his diary, after only writing it for nine years
  • 1739

    1739
    David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature, in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science
  • 1776

    1776
    English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  • 1818

    Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes probably his best-known poem, the sonnet Ozymandias Two of Jane Austen's novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are published in the year after her death
  • 1849

    1849
    Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels
  • 1892

    1892
    W.B. Yeats founds the National Literary Society in Dublin, with Douglas Hyde as its first president W.B. Yeats publishes a short play The Countess Cathleen, his first contribution to Irish poetic drama
  • 1929

    1929
    Richard Hughes publishes his first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica
  • 1988

    1988
    British physicist Stephen Hawking explains the cosmos for the general reader in A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes