British Time Periods

Old English Period

428-1100; Beowulf, Old English, Pagan, Vikings, Normans, Danes, Germanic, Anglo-Saxons; end is really marked by the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Battle of Hastings

Anglo-Norman Period

1100-1350; Norman aka French domination; Holy Wars aka the Crusades happening; Magna Carta in 1215; King Arthur inspiration; legends, satires, tales, romances, religious plays

Middle English Period

1350-1500; Chaucer: Canterbury Tales; Black Plague; Rise of the Lollards; Le Morte D'Arthur; Humanism, moralism, Wycliffe & his sermons and his translation of Bible; War of the Roses

Renaissance Period

1500-1660; translates to "rebirth"; no more medeival times; blending Christianity w/pre-established paganism; discovery of America; Copernicus; Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe

Renaissance: Early Tudor Age

1500-1557; literary experimentation like Italian Sonnet, Terza Rima, Ottava Rima, Blank Verse. New poetry forms that paved way for Elizabethans. Medieval drama still prevalent

Renaissance: Elizabethan Age

1557-1603; Queen Elizabeth; "Golden age of English Lit"; Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Bacon, Johnson; great outburst of lyric; highest development of drama

Renaissance: Jacobean Age

1603-1625; King James I; Transitionary age: began as continuation of Eliz., then showed Carol. Traits. Shakespeare and Donne still here; classical tragedy, realistic comedy, masques, Shakespeare's GREATEST works; Webster, Chapman, Middleton, Massinger

Renaissance: Caroline Age

1625-1642; King Charles I; Cavalier Lyricists; Classicism advancing while romanticism and drama fading; violent, religious controversy; Puritans moving to America; 'known as last age of Renaissance??' even though there's one more according to the same book…

Renaissance: Commonwealth Interegnum

1642-1660; AKA Puritan Interegnum; killed Charles II; Oliver Cromwell leading the politcal way; when he dies, the commonwealth does too. John Milton! Dryden, Vaughn, Waller, Cowley, Marvell, Davenant; theatres were closed

Neoclassic Period

1660-1798; return of Charles II aka the Stuarts; strong reaction against Puritanism; Milton still writing (a lot like) Paradise Lost; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Colerdige as well

Neoclassic Period: Restoration Age

1660-1700; Stuarts back to the throne: Charles II; strong reaction against Puritanism (since they led the overthrow of the monarchy earlier); Dryden is the greatest poet of this period, besides John Milton; heroic drama; John Locke, Etherage, Comedy of Manners

Neoclassic Period: Augustan Age

1700-1750; Called this for ROMAN Emperor Augustus; Virgil and Horace writing; literary culture is high; Addison, Swift, Steele, Pope; Queen Anne rules in Britain a little; often comparing Rome and Britain in many ways; GREAT AWAKENING happening in America

Neoclassic Period: Age of Johnson

1750-1798; AKA Age of Sensibility; romanticism starting to emerge; NOVELs become popular; gothic emerges; sentimental comedy; Robert Burns, William Blake, Gray, Crabbe, Smart; SAMUEL JOHNSON and his pal Boswell are greatest figures. Sensibility is greatest expression; AGE OF REASON emerges in FRANCE

Romantic Period

1798-1870; Period between publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the death of Dickens (1870). Queen Victoria rules for 'half' of this period. Imagination, intuition, individuality, idealism, inspiration

Romantic Period: Age of Romanticism

1798-1832; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, John Keats; Historical Novel emerges from Scott; Jane Austen Novel of Manners; Sci-Fi/Gothic from M. Shelley; OXFORD MOVEMENT: renewal of Catholicism

Romantic Period: Early Victorian Age

1832-1870; Seeds of new movement being sewn (with realism), but romanticism still dominant. Tennysons, the Brownings, Arnold for poetry; Dickens, Thackeray, Bronte sisters for novels; Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, De Quincy for essays

Realistic Period

1870-1914; Latter portion of Queen Victoria's reign till the beginning of WWI; British imperialism; Lots of foreign writers emerge like Ibsen, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Whitman, Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant; revolt againt Victorian standards; Tennyson and Browning poets

Realistic Period: Late Victorian Age

1870-1901; Period between death of Dickens and death of Queen Vic.; George Eliot and Thomas Hardy greatest novelists; Newman, Arnold, Huxley, Spencer for essays; Ibsen revives the drama; Stevenson, WH Hudson, and Kipling revive romantic fiction; Wilde intro. AESTHETICISM (art for art's sake); Doyle, Stoker

Realistic Period: Edwardian Age

1901-1914; Death of Q. Vic in 1901 till WWI starts; Celtic Renaissance in Ireland w/WB Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde' Madox Ford flourishes in criticism; JAMES JOYCE, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Butler; Shaw for drama; Yeats for poetry

Modernist Period

1914-1965; bc Edwardian age is so short, lots of same authors around; this period includes WWI-II, Huxley, DH Lawrence; Stream of consciousness introduced; Eliot, Auden, Yeats; lots of unhappy people bc of so much war

Postmodern Period

1965- ; Empiricism slows/falls; Irish feuds religiously w/other British countries; Margaret Drabble, Graham Green, Durell, Amis; playwrights: John Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard; "England grasping for position and definition in a world diminished of political/social reality and art