History of English Literature, Periods and Popular Authors

Dear students,

You will learn here the History of English Literature, Periods, and Popular Authors in chronicle order. The history of English Literature is divided into various periods. many events and reigns of the Kings and queens are depicted in the content below.

1. Classical Period (1200 BCE to 450 BCE) – (Dark Age)

H. Homeric ex Heroic Period (1200BCE to 800 BCE)

G. Greek classical Period (800BCE to 200 BCE)

R. Roman classical briod (200 BCE- 450CE)

P- Patristic Period (70CE TO 455CE)

2. 2450 – 1066: Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) Period

3. 1066 – 1500: Middle English Period (or Anglo- Norman Period)

4. 1500-1600: The Renaissance (or Early Modern)

1558 – 1603: Elizabethan Age– Age of Shakespeare

1603 – 1625: Jacobean Age

1625 – 1649: Caroline Age

1619 – 1660: Commonwealth Period (or Puritan Interregnum)- Age of Milton

5. 1660-1798: The Neoclassical Period

1660-1700: The Restoration “Age of Milton 1

1700 – 1745: The Augustan (or Age of Alexander Pope)

1745 – 1798: The Age of Sensibility Transitional Period (or Age of Dr. Johnson)

6. 1798 – 1837: The Romantic Period (Age of Wordsworth)

7. 1837-1901: The Victorian Period

1848 – 1860: The Pre-Raphaelites

1880 – 1901: Aestheticism and Decadence

8. 1901 – 1945: Modern Period (Age of Galsworthy)

1901 – 1914: The Edwardian Period

1910 – 1936: The Georgian Period

9. 1945 up to Present – Postmodern Period

High Modernism starts from 1914 – the beginning of First World War)

Major Authors in the above Periods

Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) Period: Caedmon, Cynewulf, King Alfred

Middle English Period: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, John Wycliffe

Elizabethan Age: Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, University Wits (Christopher Marlowe, Robert Green, John Lilly, George Peele, Thomas Nash, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Kyd) Jacobean Age: Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Fletcher, John Webster, George Chapman

Caroline Age: John Milton, George Herbert, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne Commonwealth: John Milton, Hobbes, Sir Thomas Browne, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, Sir William Davenant, Andrew Marvell

The Neoclassical Period:-

The Restoration: Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley, William Congreve. John Dryden, Aphra Behn (the first English woman writer)

The Augustan: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, Four Wheels of English Novel (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Thomas Sterne, Tobias Smollett )

The Age of Sensibility: Samuel Johnson (Dr. Johnson). Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, William Collins, Thomas Gray

The Romantic Period: William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey. Mary Wollstonecraft, Leigh Hunt, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley

The Victorian Period:

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte,

The Pre-Raphaelites: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Millais), Christina Rossetti, William Morris, A.C. Swnburne

Aestheticism and Decadence: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson

Modern Period: W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, WH.Auden, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing,

G.B. Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard: English Critics (T.S. Eliot, A. Richards, Virginia Woolf, F.R. Leavis, William Empson                                                                                                                       The Edwardian Period: Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, H.G. wells, Henry James

The Georgian Period: Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Ralph, Hodgson, W.H. Davies, John Masefield

 Postmodernism: Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, etc. The main theories developed during Post-Modern periods were Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction. Third feminism, Hyper-reality: Psychoanalytical theory