Literature in Time - Literary Periods

600-1200

Old English. (Anglo-Saxon) Period

1200-1500

Middle English Period

1500-1600

The Renaissance

1600-1785

1558-1603

Elizabethan Age

1603-1625

Jacobean Age

1625-1649

Caroline Age

1649-1669

Commonwealth Period

The Neoclassical Period

1660-1700

The Restoration

1700-1745

The Augustan Age. (Age of Pope)

1745-1785

The Age of Sensibility. (Age of

Johnson)

1785-1830

The Romantic Period

1830-1901

The Victorian Period

1848-1860

The Pre-Raphaelites

1880-1901

Aestheticism and Decadence

1901-1914

The Edwardian Period

1910-1936

The Georgian Period

1914-

The Modern Period

Old English period 600-1200

It was oral tradition but at the end of the period it became written
The style of their literature was poetry and prose
Heroic poetry
Poetry

(Beowulf 8theC)
Christianity poetry
Bible translation

Prose

(Aelfric)
Grammar prose

English, as we know it, descends from the language spoken by the North
Germanic tribes who settled in England from the 5th century A.D. onwards. They had no
writing (except runes, used as charms) until they learned the Latin alphabet from Roman
missionaries. The earliest written works in Old English (as their language is now known to
scholars) were probably composed orally at first, and may have been passed on from speaker
to speaker before being written. We know the names of some of the later writers (Cdmon,
lfric and King Alfred) but most writing is anonymous. Old English literature is mostly
chronicle and poetry - lyric, descriptive but chiefly narrative or epic. By the time literacy
becomes widespread, Old English is effectively a foreign and dead language. And its forms
do not significantly affect subsequent developments in English literature. (With the scholarly
exception of the 19th century poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who finds in Old English verse
the model for his metrical system of "sprung rhythm".)
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Middle English period 1200-1500

This period was known by their famous writer Geoffrey Chaucer (the father of the English
literature) with Canterbury tales.
At that time tales was prose or poetry, religious (songs, bible, and prose) or secular.
Prose and poetry was about fiction

They create some characters to tell the story

Characters: from the church but was secular.
Some: for having different opinion

To criticise the church as an institution because it was related to politics

From 1200 onwards, the language is known to scholars as Middle English. Ideas and
themes from French and Celtic literature appear in English writing at about this time, but the
first great name in English literature is that of Geoffrey Chaucer (?1343-1400). Chaucer
introduces the iambic pentameter line, the rhyming couplet and other rhymes used in Italian
poetry (a language in which rhyming is arguably much easier than in English, thanks to the
frequency of terminal vowels). Some of Chaucer's work is prose and some is lyric poetry, but
his greatest work is mostly narrative poetry, which we find in Troilus and Criseyde and The
Canterbury Tales. Other notable mediaeval works are the anonymous Pearl and Gawain and
the Green Knight (probably by the same author) and William Langlands' Piers Plowman.
The renaissance 1500-1600
The re-birth of science ant art

Greek literature

They wrote for pleasure and art not for religious purpose.
Printing machine was made so they could read the bible = john Wycliffe= the reformation
Renaissance
Optivism

elegance spirit of reformation

Great as was the stimulus of literary culture, it was only one of several influences
that made up the Renaissance. While Greek was speaking so powerfully to the cultivated
class, other forces were contributing to revolutionize life as a whole and all men's outlook
upon it. The invention of printing, multiplying books in unlimited quantities where before
there had been only a few manuscripts laboriously copied page by page, absolutely
transformed all the processes of knowledge and almost of thought.
The first great English dramatist is Marlowe. Before the 16th century English drama
meant the amateur performances of Bible stories by craft guilds on public holidays. Marlowe's
plays (Tamburlaine; Dr. Faustus; Edward II and The Jew of Malta) use the five act
structure and the medium of blank verse, which Shakespeare finds so productive. Shakespeare
develops and virtually exhausts this form.
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