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Period: 450 to 1066
Old English (Anglo-Saxon)
Much of the first half of this period—prior to the seventh century, at least—had oral literature. A lot of the prose during this time was a translation of something else or otherwise legal, medical, or religious in nature; however, some works, such as Beowulf and those by period poets Caedmon and Cynewulf, are important. -
Period: 1066 to 1500
Middle English Period
This period sees a huge transition in the language, culture, and lifestyle of England and results in what we can recognize today as a form of “modern” (recognizable) English. -
1500
The Renaissance
It is also known as “Early Modern” This period is often subdivided into four parts, including the Elizabethan Age (1558–1603), the Jacobean Age (1603–1625), the Caroline Age (1625–1649), and the Commonwealth Period (1649–1660). -
Period: 1558 to
Elizabethan Age
The Elizabethan Age was the golden age of English drama. Some of its noteworthy figures include Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, of course, William Shakespeare. -
The Neoclassical Period
In direct opposition to Renaissance attitudes, where man was seen as basically good, the Neoclassical writers portrayed man as inherently flawed. They emphasized restraint, self-control, and common sense. This was a time when conservatism flourished in both politics and literature. It is also subdivided into ages, including The Restoration, The Augustan Age and The Age of Sensibility. -
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The Jacobean Age
It includes the works of John Donne, Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, John Webster, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and Lady Mary Wroth.The King James translation of the Bible also appeared during the Jacobean Age. -
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The Caroline Age
It covers the reign of Charles I (“Carolus”). John Milton, Robert Burton, and George Herbert are some of the notable figures. -
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The Commonwealth Period
John Milton and Thomas Hobbes’ political writings appeared and, while drama suffered, prose writers such as Thomas Fuller, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell published prolifically. -
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The Restoration
It sees some response to the puritanical age, especially in the theater. Restoration comedies (comedies of manner) developed during this time under the talent of playwrights like William Congreve and John Dryden. -
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The Augustan Age
Augustan‖ was applied as a term of high praise, because the Age of Augustus was the golden age of Latin literature, so the Age of Pope was the golden age of English literature. It was the time of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who imitated those first Augustans and even drew parallels between themselves and the first set. -
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The Age of Sensibility
In recognition of the high value that many Britons came to place on explorations of feeling and emotion in literature and the other arts. This class offers an advanced introduction to fiction and poetry of the later eighteenth century. -
The Romantic Period
During this time, literature began to move in channels that were not entirely new but were in strong contrast to the standard literary practice of the eighteenth century. American literature has its own Romantic period, but typically when one speaks of Romanticism, one is referring to this great and diverse age of British literature, perhaps the most popular and well-known of all literary ages. -
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The Gothic era
The Graveyard School of poetry, so called because of the attention its poets gave to ruins, graveyards, death, and human mortality, flourished in the mid-eighteenth century and provided a thematic and literary context for the Gothic. Walpole's novel was wildly popular, and his novel introduced most of the stock conventions of the genre: an intricate plot; stock characters; subterranean labyrinths; ruined castles; and supernatural occurrences. -
The Victorian Period
The Victorian period is in strong contention with the Romantic period for being the most popular, influential, and prolific period in all of English (and world) literature. Poets of this time include Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, among others. Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater were advancing the essay form at this time. -
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Early Victorian Era
Novels were the most prevalent form of literature in the early Victorian period. Bestsellers such as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell published lengthy novels in serial form in newspapers, the episodes of which reached a thousand pages in book form. Early Victorian novels were highly descriptive and emotionally expressive and strove to be earnest and wholesome. -
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Mid Victorian Era
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Pre-Raphaelites
The Pre-Raphaelites were a loose and baggy collective of Victorian poets, painters, illustrators and designers whose tenure lasted from 1848 to roughly the turn of the century. Drawing inspiration from visual art and literature, their work privileged atmosphere and mood over narrative, focusing on medieval subjects, artistic introspection, female beauty, sexual yearning and altered states of consciousness. -
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Late Victorian Era
Most novelists from this period retained the realist mode, though the adventure/fantasy and mystery formats also came into their own during the 1880s. Social satire continued to be a popular genre. -
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Aestheticism and Decadence
Aestheticism and decadence shocked the Victorian establishment by challenging traditional values, foregrounding sensuality and promoting artistic, sexual and political experimentation. Dr Carolyn Burdett explores the key features of this unconventional artistic period. -
The Edwardian Period
It was a short period. The era includes incredible classic novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Henry James (who was born in America but spent most of his writing career in England); notable poets such as Alfred Noyes and William Butler Yeats; and dramatists such as James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy. -
The Georgian Period
The origins of Georgian literature date to the 4th century, when the Georgian people were converted to Christianity and a Georgian alphabet was developed. The emergence of a rich literary language and an original religious literature was simultaneous with a massive effort to translate texts from Greek, Armenian, and Syriac. Old Georgian ecclesiastical literature reached its acme in the 10th century with the lyrical hymns composed and collected by Ioane Minchkhi and Mikael Modrekili. -
The Modern Period
The period saw an abrupt break away from the old ways of interacting with the world. In all the previous periods experimentation and individualism were highly discouraged but With the onset of the modern period both these things became virtues. Some of the most notable writers of this period include the novelists James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Doris Lessing, -
The Postmodern Period
Poststructuralist literary theory and criticism developed during this time. Some notable writers of the period include Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Penelope M. Lively, and Iain Banks. Many postmodern authors wrote during the modern period as well. In literature, postmodernism reacted against the Enlightenment ideas implicit in modernist literature – informed by Lyotard’s concept of the “metanarrative”.
