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Period: 450 to 1066
OLD ENGLISH / ANGLO-SAXON period
Begins with the invasion of Celtic England by Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians) c.450. Lasts until the conquest of England by the Norman-French William the Conqueror in 1066.
LANGUAGE: Closer to modern German than modern English.
GENRES: Epic poetry, bible translations, hagiography, chronicles, riddles, religious verse or prose
NOTABLE WORKS AND PERSONALITIES:
Beowulf, The Old English Martyrology, Venerable Bede
Alfred the Great. -
Period: 1066 to 1500
MIDDLE ENGLISH period
From the Norman invasion up to the time when literary dialects were forms.
LANGUAGE: Middle English, with a profound French influence.
GENRES: Chivalric romances, secular and religious songs, folk ballads, drama, morality and miracle plays
NOTABLE WORKS AND PERSONALITIES: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Dream of the Rood, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales -
Period: 1500 to
The RENAISSANCE
Associated with the pan-European renaissance. Increased emphasis on humanism and individuality, satirizing the church and state, emphasis on secular themes.
NOTABLE WORKS AND PERSONALITIES: Henry Howard, The Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, Sir Thomas Elyot, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, King James Bible, John Donne, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Cavalier Poets, John Milton. -
Period: to
The NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD
A period of political and military unrest, British naval supremacy, economic growth, the rise of the middle class, colonial expansion, the rise of literacy, the birth of the novel and periodicals, the invention of marketing, the rise of the Prime Minister, and social reforms.
NOTABLE AUTHORS: John Bunyan, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson's essays and Dictionary, Sheridan's The School for Scandal. -
Period: to
The ROMANTIC period
Emphasis on feeling and imagination; looking toward nature for insight into the divine; the individual and his/her subjective experiences and expressions of those experiences; artistic and aesthetic freedoms in contrast to the ideals of neoclassicism. NOTABLE AUTHORS: Robert Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, P.B. Shelley, John Keats; Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. -
Period: to
The VICTORIAN PERIOD
Named for the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain’s longest reigning monarch. Period of stability and prosperity for Britain. Class consciousness. Emphasis on realistic portrayals of common people, sometimes to promote social change. Some continue to explore gothic themes begun in Romantic Period. Aestheticism. NOTABLE AUTHORS: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, W.M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde. -
Period: to
The EDWARDIAN period
Named by the reign of Edward VII. Published after the Victorian period and before WWI. No consistent style/theme/genre. Writers mostly concerned with implications of living in a new and more scientific and inventive world - rapid developing technology (cars, phones, plumbing), social change and changing values. NOTABLE AUTHORS: William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, G.B. Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Barrie. -
Period: to
The MODERN period
Spans the years between WWI and WWII. Reaction against the values which led to WWI. Works in this period reflect the changing social, political, and cultural climate and are diverse, experimental, and nontraditional. NOTABLE AUTHORS: A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore.
Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, D.H Lawrence, Sean O'Casey, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Heartbreak House. -
Period: to
The POSTMODERD period
The works are highly experimental and anti-conventional. Influenced by Freud, Sartre, Camus, Derrida, and Foucault. Deconstruction: text has no inherent meaning; meaning derives from the tension between the text’s ambiguities and contradictions revealed upon close reading. NOTABLE AUTHORS: J.D. Salinger,, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell,, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Graham Greene, John Fowles, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan, A.S. Byatt, Samuel Beckett, Noel Coward, Tom Stoppard.