Handout 102

Outline of English Literary Periods

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The most significant authors are presented in bold type [e.g., Homer].

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Authors in brackets pre or post-date slightly the movement they are listed under, but are usually associated with that movement

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Longer lists are divided into genres by slashes (/).

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Authors are "keyed" to the genre they are MOST associated with, as follows:
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  (p): poetry, incl. epic & lyric ~

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  (d): drama, incl. tragedy & comedy

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  (f): fiction, incl. the novel & short story

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  (hb): history or (auto)biography

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  (pp): philosophy or political propaganda

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  (r): religious polemics

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  (s): science or social science

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  (pr): miscellaneous prose (general essays, criticism, etc.)

I. Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period (ca. 450-1100):  Beowulf (p), Cynewulf(p), "The Seafarer"(p), "The Wanderer"(p)

II. Anglo-Norman Period (ca. 1100-1350):   The Owl and the Nightingale (p), Layamon(p), "Cuckoo Song"(p)

III. Middle English Period (ca. 1350-1500):  ... {folk ballads(p),} The Second Shepherds' Song(d), Malory(f), Everyman(d) Age of Chaucer (ca. 1350-1400): Langland(p), Chaucer(p), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight(p)

IV. Renaissance (ca. 1500-1660):

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Early Tudor Age (ca. 1500-1558): Skelton(p), More(pp), Wyatt(p), Surrey(p)

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Elizabethan Age (ca. 1558-1603):  p: Spenser,  Sidney / d: Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare

bulletJacobean Age (ca. 1603-1625):  s: F. Bacon / d: Middleton, Jonson, Webster, Beaumont & Fletcher / pr: Burton / r: King James Bible
bulletPuritan & Cavalier Period (ca. 1625-1660):
bulletMetaphysical School (ca. 1600-1660):  p: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Cowley, Vaughn, [Traherne]
bulletCaroline Age (ca. 1625-1649): Cavalier Poets:  p: Herrick, Carew, Waller, Suckling, Lovelace
bulletCommonwealth Period (ca. 1649-1660): Hobbes(pp), Walton(pr), Browne(pr)

V. Neoclassical Period (ca. 1660-1798):

bulletRestoration (Age of Dryden) (ca. 1660-1700):  p: Milton, Butler, Marvell, Dryden / r: Bunyan /  pp: Locke / pr: Pepys / d: Wycherley, Congreve
bulletAugustan Age (Age of Pope) (ca. 1700-1750): f: DeFoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding / pr: Addison & Steele / pp: Berkeley, Hume / d: Gay / p: Pope
bulletAge of Johnson (ca. 1750-1798):  pr: Johnson / f: Sterne, Smollet, Goldsmith / p: Collins, Cowper, Crabbe / pp: Burke / hb: Gibbon, Boswell / d: Sheridan, Graveyard School (fl. 1740's&50's):  p: Young, Thompson, Gray

VI. Romantic Period (ca. 1798-1870):

bulletRomantic Age (ca. 1798-1832): p: [Blake, Burns,] Byron, P.B. Shelley, Keats / f: Scott, Austen,  M. Shelley / pr: Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Lake Poets (fl. 1790's-1810's):  p: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey
bulletEarly Victorian Age (ca. 1832-1870): pr: Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin / r: Newman / pp: J.S. Mill /  s: Darwin / p: Tennyson, Browning / f: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Bront‘(s) Pre-Raphaelites (fl. 1850's&60's):  p: Rosetti(s), Morris

VII. Realistic Period (ca. 1870-1914):

bulletLate Victorian Age (ca. 1870-1901):  f: G. Eliot, Meredith, Carroll, Butler, Hardy, H. James, Stevenson s: Spencer, T.H. Huxley, Frazer /  pr: Arnold, Pater / p: Swinburne, Hopkins, Decadents (fl. 1890's): Wilde(d), Dowson(p)
bulletEdwardian Age (ca. 1901-1914):  d: Shaw, Barrie / f: Conrad, Kipling, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Saki /  p: Housman, Irish Renaissance (ca. 1890-1930): Yeats(p), AE(p), Synge(d), O'Casey(d)

VIII. Modern(ist) Period (ca. 1914-1945): pp: Whitehead, Russell / f: Maugham, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Mansfield, A. Huxley / p: T.S. Eliot, Auden, Spender, D. Thomas

IX. Post-Modern(ist) Period (ca. 1945->): f: Orwell, Greene, Lowry, Golding, Durrell, Burgess, Amis, Fowles /  p: Larkin / d: Pinter

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