Periods of British literature
600-1200
Old English (Anglo-Saxon) period
1200-1500 Middle English period
Beowulf
Geoffrey Chaucer
1476 - William Caxton introduces printing
1500-1649 Renaissance
(The Elizabethan period, the Jacobean
Thomas More
William Shakespeare
period, Caroline period)
Christopher Marlowe
1649-1660 The Commonwealth and The
Protectorate
Jonathan Milton – Paradise Lost
Thomas Hobbes
1660-1700 Restoration
Alexander Pope
1700-1800 Enlightenment
Alexander Pope
Jonathan Swift
18th century novel
Daniel Defoe
Henry Fielding – The History of Tom Jones
Lawrence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, a Gentleman
Classicism
Jane Austen
1785-1830 Romanticism
 pre-romantic
William Blake, Robert Burns
 gothic novel
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Emily Brönte
 historical novel
Walter Scott
 Lake poets
William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge,
 Revolutionary romantics
Byron, P.B. Shelley
1830-1901 Victorian period
Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy
Oscar Wilde
R.L. Stevenson, A.C. Doyle
G.B. Shaw
1901-1960 Modern period
 predecessors of modernism
Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling
 modernism
D.H.Lawrence
James Joyce (Irish)
Virginia Woolf (Bloomsbury group), E.M. Forster
 modernist poetry
Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, W.B. Yeats
 1930s-1950s fiction
Aldous Huxley, George Orwell
William Golding
since 1960
 angry young men
Kingsley Amis
 theatre of absurd
Sameul Beckett (Irish)
 fantasy
J.R.R. Tolkien
Postmodern and contemporary period
 poetry
Ted Hughes
 moral issues novels
Anthony Burgess
 postmodern novel
John Fowles
 postcolonial literature
Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Michael
Ondaatje
Periods of American literature
1607 ‐
Colonial Period
Captain John Smith
1776
1765‐ 1790 The Enlightenment
Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Paine – Common sense
Thomas Jefferson – The Declaration of
Independence
1775‐ 1865 The Early National Period and
The Romantic Period
Washington Irving, J.F. Cooper
Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne
E.A. Poe
(The Age of Transcendentalism)
1865‐ 1914 The Realistic Period and
The Naturalistic Period
R.W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau
Mark Twain
Henry James
Kate Chopin
Stephen Crane
Jack London
Theodor Dreiser
1850-1950 Poetry
Emily Dickinson
T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound
Walt Whitman
1914‐ 1939 American Modernist Period
(Jazz Age, Harlem Renaissance –
F. Scott Fitzerald
William Faulkner
1920s) – ends with the Great Depression
1920s-
The "Lost Generation"
1930s
1939-
Gertrud Stein
Ernest Hemingway
The Contemporary Period
present
John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger
John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron
Sylvia Plath
 Beat Writers (1950s)
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac
 Postmodernim
Raymond Carver, John Barth
 American Jewish literature
Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Chaim Potok
 Afro-American literature
Alice Walker, Toni Morisson
 Poetry
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, e e cummings
 Drama
Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neil
Edward Albee (Theatre of Absurd)