Literary Time Periods

This period was between the invasion of England by the Teutonic tribes of Angeles, Saxons, and Jutes, beginning around 428, and the establishment of Norman rule around 1000, following the triumphant conquest by the Norman French under William the Conquerer

Old English Period

In this period, christianity was introduced and gradually won out over the pagan culture

Old English Period

During this period, learning and culture flourished in the monasteries, with Whitby the cradle of English poetry in the North and Winchester of English prose in the South

Old English Period

Although much writing throughout this period was in Latin, Christian monks began writing in what we call Old English around 700

Old English Period

The ________________ (1066) put an end to serious literary work in the old english language

Norman Conquest

This period of English literature occurred between 1100 and 1350, so called because of the dominance of Norman-French culture

Anglo-Norman period

This period is also known as the Early Middle English period and is frequently dated from the conquest in 1066

Anglo-Norman period

During this period, Latin was used for learned works, French for courtly literature, and English chiefly for popular works- religious plays, metrical romances, and popular ballads

Anglo-Norman period

The period in English literature between the replacement of French by Middle English as he language of the court and the early appearances of Modern English writings, roughly between 1350 and 1500.

Middle English Period

During this period, the early traces of humanism began to appear, the great cycles of mystery plays flourished, romances continued to be popular, and there was a revival of alliterative verse

Middle English Period

This time period included the Age of Chaucer (1340-1400) which was marked by political and religious unrest, the Black Death (1348-1350), the Peasant's Revolt (1381), and the rise of the Lollards

Middle English Period

This period was a transition from the medieval to the modern world in Western Europe. The new humanistic learning that resulted from the rediscovery of classical literature is frequently taken as the beginning of this period on its intellectual side

Renaissance

This period is generally considered to have begun a little before 1500 and to lave lasted until the Commonwealth Interregnum (1649-1660). It included the Early Tudor Age (1500-1557), the Elizabethan Age (1558-1603), the Jacobean Age (1603-1625) and the Caroline Age (1625-1642)

Renaissance

This period occurred during the early years of the sixteenth century, when the ideals of the Renaissance were rapidly replacing those of the Middle Ages. The Reformation of the English church and the revival of humanism modified English life substantially

Early Tudor Age

This period was a time of literary experimentation and of borrowings from French and Italian writings. Wyatt and Surrey imported the Italian sonnet, Terza Rima, and Ottava Rima, and Surrey first used blank verse

Early Tudor Age

The segment of the Renaissance during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). The term is sometimes extended to include the Jacobean Age (1603-1625)

Elizabethan Age

This age of great nationalistic expansion, commercial growth, and religious controversy saw the development of English drama to its highest level, a great outburst of lyric poetry, and a new interest in criticism. It has been called the "Golden Age of English Literature"

Elizabethan Age

The portion of the Renaissance during the reign of James I (1603-1625). Early writings of this period were a rich flowering of the Elizabethan, and writing late in this period showed attitudes characteristic of the Caroline Age

Jacobean Age

During this period, the breach between Puritan and Cavalier widened, and there was a robust growth of realism in art and cynicism in thought. It is the greatest period for the English drama, and it saw the publication of the King James translation of the Bible

Jacobean Age

Applied to the age of Charles I in England (1625-1642) and in particular to the spirit of the court of Charles. It might cover all of the literature at the time, both Cavalier and Puritan, or it might be used more specifically for writings by the royalist group, such as the Cavalier Lyricists

Caroline Age

The period between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, during which England was ruled by Parliament under the control of the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell

Commonwealth Interregnum

The period in English literature between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. It includes the Restoration Age (1660-1700), the Augustan Age (1700-1750), and the Age of Johnson (1750-1798)

Neoclassic Period

in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign in origin, in which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by ___________ and brought to supreme application by William Shakespeare.

Geoffrey Chaucer

During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts; and ideas of ____________ literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the 19th century for a less specific, though still selectively viewed, Classical antiquity continued to shape the literature.

Augustan

Irish, Scots, and Welsh writers have contributed enormously to English literature even when they have written in dialect, as the 18th-century poet __________ and the 20th-century Scots writer __________ have done.

Robert Burns, Alasdair Gray

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries brought with them the common ____________; but of their earliest oral poetry, probably used for panegyric, magic, and short narrative, little or none survives.

Germanic metre

Virtually all ______________ poetry is written in a single metre, a four-stress line with a syntactical break, or caesura, between the second and third stresses, and with alliteration linking the two halves of the line; this pattern is occasionally varied by six-stress lines.

Old English

Other standard devices of ___________ poetry are the kenning, a figurative name for a thing, usually expressed in a compound noun

Old English

(Middle English Period) By the end of the 12th century, English poetry had been so heavily influenced by __________ models that such a work as the long epic Brut (c. 1200) by Lawamon, a Worcestershire priest, seems archaic for mixing alliterative lines with rhyming couplets while generally eschewing ___________ vocabulary

French

(Middle English Period) The 13th century saw a rise in the popularity of long ____________ poems presenting biblical narrative, saints' lives, or moral instruction for those untutored in Latin or French.

didactic

The earliest examples of _____________, a genre that would remain popular through the Middle Ages, appeared in the 13th century. King Horn and Floris and Blauncheflour both are preserved in a manuscript of about 1250.

verse romance

The most frequent topics in the Middle English secular lyric are ___________ and ____________; many rework such themes tediously, but some, such as "Foweles in the frith" (13th century) and "Ich am of Irlaunde" (14th century), convey strong emotions in a few lines.

springtime, romantic love

(Later Middle English) Insofar as it was considered a serious literary medium at all, English was obliged to compete on uneven terms with ________ and with the Anglo-Norman dialect of _________ widely used in England at the time

Latin, French

Literary culture in the ______________ period managed to survive and in fact to flourish in the face of such potentially crushing factors as the catastrophic mortality of the Black Death (1347-51), chronic external and internal military conflicts in the form of the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses, and serious social, political, and religious unrest, as evinced in the Peasants' Revolt (1381) and the rise of Lollardism (centred on the religious teachings of John Wycliffe)

Later Middle English

The most puzzling episode in the development of later Middle English literature is the apparently sudden reappearance of unrhymed ____________ in the mid-14th century.

alliterative poetry

In the ______________ period, English began to displace Anglo-Norman as the language spoken at court and in aristocratic circles, and signs of royal and noble patronage for English vernacular writers became evident.

Later Middle English

From the late 14th century onward, two main dramatic genres are discernible, the mystery, or _______________, cycles and the ____________. The mystery plays were long cyclic dramas of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption of humankind, based mostly on biblical narratives.

Corpus Christi, morality plays

The __________- age was the greatest period for the English drama, and writers such as Shakespeare were at their peaks

Jacobean

The __________ is the period between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, during which England was ruled under Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell

Commonwealth Interregnum

The literature of the _____________ reflects the reaction against Puritanism, the receptiveness to French influence, and the dominance of classical points of view

Restoration Age

The revival of the drama is an especially interesting feature of the

Restoration Age

In the ____________, the Comedy of Manners was developed by such writers as Etheredge, Wucherly, and Congreve; the Heroic Drama by such as Dryden, Howard, and Otway

Restoration Age

The period in English literature between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the publication of the lyrical ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798

Neoclassic Period

This period includes the Restoration Age, the Augustan Age, and the Age of Johnson

Neoclassic period

In the Neoclassic period, the __________ became a major verse form; the ode was a widely used genre; and poetry usually served didactic or satiric purposes

Heroic Couplet

Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden were the principal writers of this period, with Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress being its major achievements in literature

Neoclassic Period

In the _______________, classical ideals of taste, polish, common sense, and reason were more important than emotion and imagination. Deism was advancing, and the rule of reason resulted in a literature that was realistic, satirical, moral, correct, and affected strongly by politics

Augustan

In the _____________, the developing interest of human freedom, the widening range of intellectual interests and human sympathies, the developing appreciation of external nature and country life, the evolving cult of the primitive- all joined with such political events as the American and French revolutions with such religious movements as the rise of methodism to establish the bedrock on which English Romanticism was to rest

Age of Johnson

In the Age of Johnson, Sterne and Mackenzie developed the ____________; Horace, Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, and Clara Reeves the ______________

Novel of Sensibility, Gothic Novel

This period, ending with the "second revolution" represented by the ascendancy of Jacksonian democracy, as the time of the establishment of the new nation

Revolutionary and Early National Period

In the period between the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the death of Dickens, English literature was dominated by

Romanticism

The _________________ saw union with Ireland, witnessed the Industrial Revolution, was torn by Chartism and the great debates centering on the reform bill, and both espoused and despised the doctrine of utilitarianism

Romantic Period

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Arnold, the pre-raphaelites, and Browning were all part of the

Romantic Period

This period was a time of the gradual tempering of the romantic impulse and the steady growth of realism in English letters

Early Victorian Age

The _________________ was a period of time of the gradual tempering of the romantic impulse and the steady growth of realism in English letters . Even if the romantic spirit remained powerful, the enactment or realization of it suffered a falling off, and many critics have come to regard this period as one of heightened or even pathological romanticism of spirit

Early Victorian Age

In the _____________ age, the voices of major romantics, except for Wordsworth, had been stilled by death, and there emerged a new poetry more keenly aware of social issues and more marked by doubts and uncertainties resulting from the pains of the Industrial revolution and the advances in scientific thought

Early Victorian

The chief writers of poetry in the _________________ age were Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and the young Swinburne. In the novel, Dickens, Thackeray, the Bronte sisters, and Trollope flourished. In the essay, Ruskin, Arnold, and De Quincey did outstanding work.

Early Victorian

In America, the period emerging after the Civil war was the

Realistic Period

In the _____________, the developing mass audience was served by local color writing and the historical novel, which had a great upsurge of popularity as the century ended. But in the work of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, the greatest contributions of the age were made. William Jame's pragmatism not only expressed the mood of the period but also shaped its literary expression, and expression that became increasingly critical of American life

Realistic Period

In the ____________, by the 1890s, a cynical application of darwinism to social structures, together with an acceptance Nietzsche's doctrine of the superman and of Emile Zola's concept of the experimental novel, resulted in a naturalism different from anything America had known. The publication of Theodore Drieser's "Sister Carrie" in 1900 told, more clearly than any historical document could have done, that a new America had grown from the travail of the post-civil war period

Realistic Period

In the ________________ in English literature, in the latter portion to the reign of Queen Victoria and during the reign of Edward VII, the reaction to romanticism reached its peak in full fledged realism, and by the beginning of the First World War the reaction had itself begun to come under attack.

Realistic Period

In the _____________ of English literature, the last three decades of the 19th century saw the parliamentary contests between Gladstone and Disraeli, the rise of British Imperialism, and a growth in British cosmopolitanism. Intellectuals began to feel the impact of the scientific revolution that distinguished 19th century thought.

Realistic Period

In the poetry of the _____________ in English literature, the voices of the great Victorians, Tennyson and Browning, were still heard, but a new poetry, interested in French forms and lacking in moral earnestness, was present in Swinburne and the Decadents

Realistic Period

In the _____________ of English literature, the Little Theater Movement began in England in the 1890's, about the same time that the Celtic Renaissance was enlivening the Irish stage. The problem established itself, and in the last decades of the century Wilde's Genius and the Light Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan brightened the English theater

Realistic Period

In the ____________________ Period in American Literature, the period between 1900 and 1930 in America is sharply divided by the First World War, the part before the war being dominated by naturalism and the part after by a growing international awareness, a sensitivity to European literary models, and a steadily developing symbolism in literature

Naturalistic and Symbolistic

The __________________ period in American literature say to virtual birth of modern American poetry and the emergence of the Imagists.

Naturalistic and Symbolistic

The ______________ is the period between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, so called after Edward VII, who ruled from 1901 to 1910.

Edwardian Age

The _________________ was marked by a strong reaction in thought, conduct, and art to the stiff propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. The typical attitude was critical and questioning. There was a growing distrust in the authority of religion, morality, and art, a basic doubt of the conventional "virtues" and a deep-felt need to examine existing institutions.

Edwardian Age

The ______________ was predominately an age of prose. Realism and Naturalism advanced steadily.

Edwardian Age