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Period: 460 to 1066
Old English Period
Began approximately 410 A.D. and ended with the Norman invasion of 1066, when language French and Anglo-Saxon produced Middle English and then modern English during the Middle Ages.
The most famous example is the anonymous epic "Beowulf." -
Period: 476 to 1453
Middle English Period
Middle English gave way to modern English during the Middle Ages.
The most famous is "The Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer. -
Period: 1500 to
Renaissance or Elizabethan period
William Shakespeare is the best known author of this period.
Examples of literature in this time period include "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli and Shakespeare's Macbeth. -
Period: to
18th century
Is famous for its essayists and satirists and for the appearance of the novel and its precursors. -
Period: to
British Romantic Period
Famous for its essayists and appearance of the novel and its precursors.
C. XVIII
John Keats is possibly the most famous author of this period. -
Period: to
The Victorian era
introduced seminal novelists like Dickens, Eliot, and the Bronte sisters. In literature class, poets like Hopkins, Housman and Rossetti are taught alongside non-fiction writers like Macaulay, Carlyle and Ruskin. Famous books during this time period included popular adventure novels like Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" and Daniel Dafoe's "Robinson Crusoe." -
Period: to
Modernism Period
Wish for a literature renewal.
The most famous example the love poems of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Lord Alfred Tennyson's sweeping saga of Camelot entitled "Idylls of the King," and the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure stories and novels, including his famous "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Modernist English literature includes the works of William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolfe, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence