British Literary Epochs

OLD ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Periodisation: 450 (End of Roman occupation/invasion of Germanic tribes) 1066
(Norman Conquest/Battle of Hastings)
2. Historical Background/Developments: 867 Viking rule over northern parts of England
and East Anglia
3. Literature
Religious texts (lives of saints, sermons, biblical stories): Caedmon, Cynewulf
Heroic epic poem: Beowulf
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (instituted by Alfred the Great)

MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Periodisation: 1066 (Norman Conquest) 1500 (emergence of standard English
language as an early form of modern English)
2. Historical Background/Developments
1066: Norman Conquest, influence of French language, literature and culture
1204: Loss of Normandy, gradual separation from the French
1339-1453: Hundred Years War against France
1476: introduction of printing (William Caxton)
3. Literature
Poems: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous)
Prose Romances: Morte dArthur (Thomas Malory)
Drama: mystery plays, morality plays, saints plays
4. Most important authors
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
John Gower, Confessio Amantis
William Langland, Piers Plowman (satiric poem)

RENAISSANCE
1. Periodisation: 1500 (emergence of early standard English) 1649 (closing of publich
theatres/execution of King Charles I)
1558 1603: Elizabethan Age. Named after Queen Elizabeth I (the Virgin
Queen), Tudor myth
1603-1625: Jacobean Age. Named after King James VI/I
1625-1649: Caroline Age. Named after King Charles I (beheaded, end of
Renaissance in Britain)

2. Historical Background/Developments
Elizabethan view of the world: chain of being, concept of the four humours
Humanism: Sir Thomas More (Utopia), Erasmus von Rotterdam
3. Literature
Great Age of English Drama
Dramatic subgenres: Tragedies (tragedy of fortune, tragedy of character,
revenge tragedies, love tragedies), Comedies (romantic/happy comedies,
satirical comedies of humours, problem plays, romances) & History/Chronicle
plays
Poetry: courtly love poetry, Elizabethan (English) Sonnet Cycles
4. Most important authors
Drama: William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John
Webster, John Fletcher
Poetry: William Shakespeare, Edmund Spencer, Sir Philip Sidney

COMMONWEALTH PERIOD
1. Periodisation: 1642 (Closing of theatres) 1660 (Restoration of Stuart monarchy)
2. Historical Background/Developments
Closure of public theatres in September 1642
Civil War 1642-1649
Puritan Interregnum under Oliver Cromwell: from end of Civil War and
execution of Charles I 1649 to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under
Charles II in 1660
3. Literature: mainly political pamphlets
4. Most important authors
Thomas Hobbes
John Milton

RESTORATION
1. Periodisation: 1660 (restoration of Stuart monarchy) 1689 (Bill of Rights/Glorious
Revolution) OR 1700 (death of periods major author, John Dryden)
2. Historical Background/Developments
Reopening theatres triggers creative outbursts
Significant innovations: female roles are played by women for the first time,
stage decoration and music become more elaborate, women as playwrights
3. Literature
Heroic plays 1664-1670
Classicist tragedies 1677-1784
Comedies of manners / wit / Restoration comedy

4. Most important authors

John Dryden, The Indian Emperor (Heroic play), All for Love (classicist
tragedy)
William Wycherley, The Country Wife (Comedy of manners)
William Congreve
Sir George Etherege
Samuel Pepys (mainly prose)
John Bunyan (mainly prose)

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
1. Periodisation: 1689/1700 1800
1700-1745: Augustan Age. Ends with the deaths of Swift and Pope.
Alternative names for the period: Georgian Literature, Neoclassicism, Age of
Reason. Writers draw on the literary period of Virgil, Horace and Ovid under
the Roman Emperor Augustus. Major representatives: Alexander Pope,
Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison. (Neo-classicist style continues in 2nd half of
century, then represented by Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith etc.)
1745-1785: Age of Sensibility. Stresses the emergence of new cultural
attitudes, literary theories and poetic forms in the 2nd half of the 18th century;
growing emphasis on instinct and feeling (instead of judgement and reason),
growing interest in ballads and other folk literature. Major representatives:
Thomas Grey, Thomas Percy, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias
Smollett.
2. Historical Background/Developments
Impact of the Enlightenment, empiricism, capitalism, overseas trade,
commercial imperialism
Coffee-house culture, rise of middle class
Development from feudal to bourgeois society
Development of dramatic subgenres now reflects the taste of another social
class: the emerging middle class
3. Literature/Most important authors
Sentimental comedies: Richard Steele
Domestic tragedies: George Lillo
Return of the Laughing Comedy (towards end of 18th century): Richard
Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson
Metadrama/parodies: John Gay, The Beggars Opera
Development of the novel: Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
Satires: Jonathan Swift, Gullivers Travels
Gothic novels/Gothic romances (emerged during last decades of the century):
Horace Walpole The Castle of Otrano, Anne Radcliffe The Mysteries of
Udolpho, Matthew Lewis The Monk

Realist writing: Epistolary novels; Tobias Smollett, The Expeditions of

Humphrey Clinker
Novels of Sensibility: Samuel Richardson Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,
Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady
Parodies/humorous novels: Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, a
Foundling, Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy,
Gentleman
Classicist Poetry (first half of the century, marked by poetic diction, very
elaborate language): Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock

ROMANTICISM
1. Periodisation: 1798 (Publication of Wordsworths & Coleridges Lyrical Ballads)
1837 (Beginning of Reign of Queen Victoria)
2. Historical Background/Developments
Preface to 2nd edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) outlined the aims of English
Romanticism, which through the use of everyday language enabled the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
Period usually perceived to end with ascension of Queen Victoria, however
sometimes (as in Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms) also taken to end
some years earlier (1830 or 1832), when the Reform Bill signalled the political
preoccupations of the Victorian era
Rejection of Rationalism which characterised Enlightenment
3. Literature
Major revival of lyric poetry (Ballads, sonnets, odes)
Major themes: Nature, the sublime, imagination & idea of Genius, Special
interest in children (innocence vs. experience), emotional intensity (nostalgia
for childhood or the past, horror, sentimentality, melancholy)
4. Most important authors
1st generation of poets: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel T.
Coleridge
2nd generation of poets: John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron
Prose writers: Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott (Historical novels), Jane
Austen (Comedies of Manner)

VICTORIAN PERIOD
1. Periodisation: 1837 1901 (reign of Queen Victoria)
Transition: 1820-1840 (from one period to the next): Sir Walter Scott, Jane
Austen
1837-1848: Early Victorian

 1848-1870: Mid/High Victorian

1870-1901: Late Victorian (1890s: Fin de Sicle/Decadence)
2. Historical Background/Developments
Heyday of industrial revolution
Improved transportation system (worlds first steam-powered public railway
opened 1830)
Working class conditions (establishment of Fabian society, i.e. socialist
movement)
Apex of British Imperialism (1876: Queen Victoria crowned Empress of India)
Scientific upheaval (Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species)
Great Exhibition (1851), Arts and Crafts Movement, Pre-Rafaelite
Brotherhood
Womens Question: concept of the Angel of the House; suffragette
movement calls for access to education and employment opportunities
3. Literature
Theme: beneath prosperous surface series of conflicts and anxieties emerge.
Texts reflect pressing social, economic, and cultural issues of the time
New poetic subgenre: Dramatic monologue (coined by Robert Browning, My
last Duchess)
Drama: many different, traditional dramatic forms on Victorian stage. New
subgenre: Victorian melodrama (e.g. Edward Stirling, Lestelle)
Late Victorian Drama: mocking the conventions of Victorian mainstream
theatre (Oscar Wilde, G.B. Shaw)
4. Most important authors
Poetry: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Elisabeth Barrett Browning,
Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti
Prose Novelists: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront, Emily Bront, Elisabeth
Gaskell, George Elliot, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Charles
Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, Willkie Collins, William Makepeace Thackeray,
R.L. Stevenson
Prose Realistic modes of writing: Industrial novel/social problem novel:
Elizabeth Gaskell North and South, Charles Dickens Hard Times. Regional
novel: Thomas Hardy Tess of the DUrbervilles, Far from the Madding
Crowd. Novel of development: Charles Dickens David Copperfield,
Charlotte Bront Jane Eyre.
Prose Non-realistic modes of writing: Utopias/Dystopias: H.G. Wells The
Time Machine. Sensational novel: Willkie Collins The Woman in White.
Neo-Gothic novel: Bram Stoker Dracula. Adventure novel: R.L. Stevenson
Treasure Island
Essays/Criticism: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Walter Pater

MODERNIST PERIOD
1. Periodisation: 1910/1915 1949/1945 in England (period between WWI and WWII )
1901-1910/14: Edwardian Period, named after King Edward VII
1910-1036: Georgian Period, named after King George V
2. Historical Background/Developments
Period is marked by continuous and innovative experiments in subject matter,
form, and style which lead to major creative achievements in all literary genres
3. Literature/Most important authors
Poetry: Highly experimental, free verse, including experiments with nonEuropean forms (e.g. the Japanese Haiku). W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,
Wilfried Owen, Siegfried Sassoon
Novel: Thematic innovations include the discovery of the unconscious,
challenging moral values and social norms.
Structural innovations: fragmentation, stream of conscious technique, unusual
perspectives. Representatives: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf,
D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson
Drama: experimental both in form and subject matter (challenge of moral
values and social norms). Representatives: William butler Yeats, G.B. Shaw

SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY

1. Periodisation: 1940/45 Present/Contemporary
2. Historical Background/Developments
1950s: dominant role of realism and focus on social problems in all genres
Since 1960s: new experimental forms, however, realist forms continue to be
important until today
3. Literature/Most important authors
Poetry: Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn,
Seamus Heaney
Multicultural poetry: John Agard, Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen
Novel: 1950s Angry Young Man Novel: Kingsley Amis, Keith Waterhouse
Historical novels: Martin Amis, Graham Greene, Paul Scott, J.G. Farrell,
Julian Barnes
Womens novels: Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Fay
Weldon
Experimental metafictional novel: John Fowles
Hybrid novels: Peter Ackroyd
Intercultural/Postcolonial writing: Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Chinua
Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Athol Fugard, Nadine
Gordimer
Drama: Well-made play 1950s: Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan

Theatre of the Absurd (1950s onwards): Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom
Stoppard
Historical plays/Memory plays (1970s): Peter Shaffer
Womens play (since 1970s): Caryl Churchill, Louise Page, Sue Townsend
In-Yer-Face Theatre (since 1990s): Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane