Literary Time Periods

The Elizabeth Era

1500-1650, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser

The metaphysical poets

1633-1680, Jone Donne and Andrew Marvell

The Enlightenment

1660-1790, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rene Descartes

Neoclassicism

1660-1798, Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swif

Gothic Fiction

1764-1820, horror stories, edgar Allen poe

Romanticism

1798-1832, English: Jane Austen, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. American: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier

Realism

1830-1900, Honore de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy

Victorian Era

1832-1901, Novelists: Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, William Make peace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope

Poets: Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti

Transcendentalism

1835-1860, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, Henry Davdi thoreau

Aestheticism

1835-1910, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater

the Pre-Raphaelites

1848-1870, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Swinburne

Naturalism

1865-1900, Emila Zola, Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane

Modernism

1890s-1940s

the Bloomsbury Group

1906-1930s Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes

the Harlem Renaissance

1918-1930 DuBois “The Souls of Black Folk, Hurstons, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Alain Lcoke Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen

The Lost Generation

1918-1930s Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos

High Modernism

modernist litature, James Joyce Ulysses, TS Eliot The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf

Surrealism

1920-1930s, avant-garde movement, break down the boundaries between rational and irrational. conscious and unconscious, variety of literary and artistic experiment

The Theater of the Absurd

1930-1970s, theater, responded to the apparent illogicality and purposelessness of human life in works marked by a lack of clear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis

Magical Realism

1935-present, combines realism w moments of dream-like fantasy within a single prose narrative, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Postmodernism

1945-present, response to the elitism of high modernism as well as to the horrors of WWII, disjointed, fragmented mash-up of high and low culture that reflects the absence of tradition and structure in a world driven by tech and consumerism, Toni Morrison, Salman rushdie

The Beat Generation

1950-1960s, illumination though a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs and Zen Buddhism. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac gained fame by giving readings in coffeehouses often accompanied by jazz music

Postcolonial literature

about people from former European colonies. to expand the traditional canon of Western literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions abt literature, especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity and race