Major British literary mouvements

1. Medieval Literature (c. 500–1500)

Key Works: Beowulf, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

Features: Religious texts, epic poetry, chivalric romance, and folklore

2. The Renaissance (c. 1500–1660)

Key Writers: William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton

Features: Humanism, classical influences, poetry (sonnets), drama, and exploration of individualism

3. The Enlightenment / Neoclassicism (c. 1660–1790)

Key Writers: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson

Features: Reason, order, satire, wit, and moral instruction

4. Romanticism (c. 1790–1830)

Key Writers: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley

Features: Emotion, nature, the supernatural, individualism, and rebellion against rationalism

5. Victorian Literature (c. 1837–1901)

Key Writers: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde

Features: Realism, social critique, industrialization, morality, and gothic fiction

6. Modernism (c. 1900–1945)

Key Writers: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence

Features: Stream of consciousness, fragmentation, alienation, experimentation in form

7. Postmodernism (c. 1945–present)

Key Writers: Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan

Features: Playfulness, metafiction, unreliable narrators, skepticism towards grand narratives

8. Contemporary Literature (c. 1980–present)

Key Writers: Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel

Features: Multiculturalism, globalism, identity, technology, and postcolonial themes

Windrush Generation Literature (c. 1948–Present)

Key Themes: Migration, racism, identity, belonging, cultural heritage.

Notable Writers & Works:

Sam Selvon – The Lonely Londoners (1956)

George d – The Emigrants (1954)

Andrea Levy – Small Island (2004)

Linton Kwesi Johnson – Mi Revalueshanary Fren (2002)

Zadie Smith – White Teeth (2000)