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450 BCE
Old English Literature-450 to 1600
Encompasses the surviving literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period after the settlement of the Saxons and other Germanic tribes in England (Jutes and the Angles) c. 450, after the withdrawal of the Romans, and "ending soon after the Norman Conquest" in 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles and riddles.In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period -
1066
Middle English Literature- 1066 to 1500
In this period religious literature continued to enjoy popularity and Hagiographies were written, adapted and translated: for example, The Life of Saint Audrey, Eadmer's (c. 1060 – c. 1126). At the end of the 12th century, Layamon in Brut adapted the Norman-French of Wace to produce the first English-language work to present the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.[28] It was also the first historiography written in English since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. -
1500
English Renaissance-1500 to 1660
After William Caxton introduced the printing press in England in 1476, vernacular literature flourished.[36] The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer (1549), a lasting influence on literary language. The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th to the 17th century. -
Restoration Age-1660 to 1700
Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Two Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and the holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. -
Augustan Literature- 1700 to 1750
During the 18th century literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason): a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century by people like Isaac Newton and the writings of Descartes, John Locke and Francis Bacon. -
Age of Sensibility - 1750 to 1798
This period is known as the Age of Sensibility, but it is also sometimes described as the "Age of Johnson". Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". -
Romanticism - 1798 to 1837
The Romantic period was one of major social change in England and Wales, because of the depopulation of the countryside and the rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities, that took place in the period roughly between 1750 and 1850. The movement of so many people in England was the result of two forces: the Agricultural Revolution, that involved the Enclosure of the land, drove workers off the land, and the Industrial Revolution which provided them employment -
Victorian Literature - 1837 to 1901
While in the preceding Romantic period, poetry had tended to dominate, the novel became the defining literary art form of the Victorian period.Charles Dickens dominated the first part of Victoria's reign and most rightly can be called "The King of Victorian Literature".His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between.William Thackeray's most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne -
Modernism - 1901 to 1939
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.[146] The movement was influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), James G. Frazer (1854–1941), Karl Marx () (Das Kapital, 1867), and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud -
Post-Modernism - 1940 to 2000
Though some have seen modernism ending by around 1939,with regard to English literature, "When modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to modernism occurred".In fact a number of modernists were still living and publishing in the 1950s and 1960, including T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Ezra Pound. Furthermore, Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published little until Briggflatts
