Literary Timeline
period
*sub-period*
notes
Greek
800 - 400 BC
british
american
tragedies
world
Homer (epic poet)
Iliad, Odyssey
Trojan War
1200 - 1100 BC
Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound
Peloponnesian War
430 - 400 BC
Sophocles
Oedipus the King
Euripides
Madea
Plato
Republic
Aristotle (student of Plato)
Nicomachean Ethics
Aesop (slave, satirical fables, moral lessons)
Roman
250 - 150 AD
Virgil (epic poet)
Aeneid
Horace (lyric poet)
Ovid (poet)
Old English / AngloSaxon
450 - 1070
fate
Unknown
Beowulf
religious vs. pagan
Bede (monk, historical writing)
heroic warriors
Unknown (poetry anthology)
Exeter Book
moral instruction
Murasaki Shibiku (Japan)
Tale of Genji
oral tradition
haiku poetry - Japan
Middle English
1070 - 1500
moral / religious instruction
chivalric code of honor
oral tradition, folk ballads,
plays, stock epithets, bennings
Crusades
1095 - 1291
Invention of printing press
1450
Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterbury Tales
Rumi (Persia, poet)
Petrarch (Italy, poet, invented sonnet)
Unknown
Doomesday Book (record of survey of England)
Dante (Italy)
Devine Comedy
Sir Thomas Malory
le Morte d’Arthur
Boccacio (Italy)
Decameron
Gawain Poet - Unknown (1300s, maybe John
Massey?)
Pearl
Marco Polo (1300s, Italy)
Travels of Marco Polo
Christopher Marlowe (1580s, playwright, poet)
Hero and Leander
Miguel de Cervantes (Spain)
don Quixote
Edmund Spenser (1580s, poet)
Faerie Queene
Michel de Montaigne (France, essayist)
literary criticism =
elements of plot, importance of
religion
Renaissance
1500 - 1660
conceits = elaborate metaphors
printing press
*Elizabethan*
1558 - 1603
*Jacobean*
1603 - 1625
literary criticism =
classical ideas of unity of form
and content
Machiavelli (Italy)
Prince
William Shakespeare (1590s, playwright, poet,
prolific)
Ben Johnson (1620s, playwright, poet)
*Caroline*
1625 - 1649
John Donne (1620s, poet)
*Commonwealth*
1649 - 1669
Andrew Marvell (1650s, poet)
John Milton (1660s, poet)
Paradise Lost
Henry Vaughan (1670s, poet)
John Bunyan (1670s)
Pilgrim’s Progress
Neoclssical
1660 - 1785
*Restoration*
1660 - 1700
*Augustan (Age of
Pope)*
1700 - 1745
*Puritan / Colonial
(America)*
1650 - 1750
reason + logic
Alexander Pope (1700s, poet)
John Winthrop (1630s, sermons)
City upon a Hill
Moliere (France, playwright)
Tartuffe
Industrial Revolution
1800s
Daniel Defoe (1710s)
Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
Anne Bradstreet (1660s, poet)
Voltaire (1750s, France)
Candide
Bible + church authority
Jonathan Swift (1720s, satire)
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Edwards (1730s, pious)
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
jeremiads = long prose
lamenting state of society
Henry Fielding (1740s)
Tom Jones
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1760s, France,
philosopher)
Social Contract
Samuel Johnson (1750s, dictionary)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1770s, Germany)
Faust
Horace Walpole (1760s, politician)
Adam Smith (1770s, Scotland, economist)
Wealth of Nations
Immanuel Kant (1790s, Germany)
Critique of Pure Reason
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Literary Timeline
period
*sub-period*
notes
british
american
Age of Reason
(America)
1750 - 1800
American Revolution
1750 - 1800
Thomas Jefferson (1770s, 3rd president)
Declaration of Independence
political satire
Thomas Paine (1770s)
Common Sense
world
Patrick Henry (1770s)
Give me Liberty or give me Death
Phyllis Wheatley (1770s, black poet)
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (1780s)
Federalist Papers
Romantic
1780 - 1830
lyrical ballads
William Blake (1790s, poet)
supernatural
William Wordsworth (1800s, poet)
Napoleon
1800s
Samuel Taylor Coolidge (1800s)
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan
literary criticism =
elevate common subject to the
sublime
Jane Austen (1810s)
Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,
Mansfield Park, Emma
*Gothic*
1780 - 1830
Washington Irving (1810s)
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle
James Fenimore Cooper (1820s)
Last of the Mohicans
Robert Burns (1780s, aka Rabbie Burns, Scotland,
poet)
Auld Lang Syne, Man’s a Man for a ‘That,
Halloween, Battle of Sherramiur
Jacob + Wilhelm Grimm (1810s, aka Brothers
Grimm, Germany)
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Sir Walter Scott (1820s, Scotland)
Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Lady of the Lake
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1810s, poet, novelist,
playwright)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1820s, Germany,
philosopher)
World as Will and Representation
John Keats (1810s, poet)
Hans Christian Andersen (1830s, Denmark, fairy
tales)
Princess and the Pea, Thumbelina, Little Mermaid,
Emperor’s New Clothes, Snow Queen, Ugly
Duckling
Mary Shelley (1810s)
Frankenstein
Lord Byron (1820s, poet)
Don Juan
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1830s, Poet Laureate)
Victorian
1830 - 1900
*Pre-Raphaelites*
1848 - 1860
*Transcendentalism
(America)*
1840 - 1860
*Realism (America)*
1865 - 1900
paper becomes inexpensive
Robert Browning (1840s, poet)
magazines
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1840s, poet)
American Civil War
1860s
Charlotte Bronte (1840s)
Jane Eyre
local color
William Makepeace Thackeray (1840s)
Vanity Fair
Matthew Arnold (1850s)
Dover Beach
Charles Dickens (1850s)
Oliver Twist, Christmas Carol, David
Copperfield, Tale of Two Cities, Great
Expectations
Charles Darwin (1850s, biologist)
Voyage of the Beagle, On the Origin of the
Species
George Elliot (1860s, aka Mary Anne Evans)
Silas Mariner, Middlemarch
Edgar Allen Poe (1840s, poet, short story)
Masque of the Red Death, Raven
Stendhal (1830s, realism)
Red and the Black, Charterhouse of Parma
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1840s, poet)
Paul Revere’s Ride, Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline
Alexandre Dumas (1840s, France)
Count of Monte Cristo, Three Musketeers
Henry James (1840s, transcendentalist)
Turn of the Screw, Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller
Alexandre Dumas, fils (1850s, France)
Camille
Margaret Fuller (1840s, transcendentalist)
Victor Hugo (1850s, France)
Les Miserables, Hunchback of Notre Dame
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1840s, transcendentalist)
Nature, Self-Reliance
Henry David Thoreau (1850s, transcendentalist)
Walden, Civil Disobedience
Frederick Douglass (1850s, black,
autobiography)
Nathanial Hawthorne (1850s)
Scarlet Letter, House of the Seven Gables
Herman Melville (1850s)
Moby-Dick, Billy Bud, Sailor
Lewis Caroll (1860s)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the
Looking Glass, Jaberwocky)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1850s)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Samuel Butler (1870s)
Erewhon
Abraham Lincoln (1860s, 16th president)
Gettysburg Address
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1880s, explorer)
Arabian Nights
Emily Dickenson (1860s, poet, slant rhyme)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1890s, crime
mystery)
Sherlock Holmes
Bronson Alcott (1860s, father of Louisa, teacher)
Rudyard Kipling (1890s)
Gunga Din, Jungle Book, If, Just So Stories
Baroness Emma Orczy (1900s, playwright)
Scarlet Pimpernel
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1900s)
Secret Garden
E. M. Forster (1900s)
Howards End, Passage to India
Harriet Jacobs (1860s, black)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Louisa May Alcott (1870s)
Little Women
Walt Whitman (1870s, poet, free verse)
Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself
Mark Twain (1880s, aka Samuel Clemens)
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Prince and the
Pauper, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1890s, black poet)
Ode to Ethiopia
Stephen Crane (1890s)
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Red Badge of
Courage
Ambrose Bierce (1900s, pessimist)
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Devil’s
Dictionary
Kate Chopin (1890s)
Awakening
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1860s, Ireland, poet,
sprung rhythm)
Ivan Turgenev (1860s, Russia)
Fathers and Sons
Gustave Flaubert (1860s, France)
Madame Bovary
Karl Marx (1860s, Marxism)
Communist Manifesto, Capital
Leo Tolstoy (1870s, Russia)
War and Peace, Anna Karenina
Feodor Dostoevski (1870s, Russia, mystery)
Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamozov
Jules Verne (1870s, France)
Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the
World in Eighty Days
Henrik Ibsen (1880s, playwright)
Peer Gynt, Doll’s House
Robert Louis Stevenson (1880s, Scotland)
Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde
Oscar Wilde (1890s, Ireland)
Picture of Dorian Gray, Importance of Being
Earnest, De Profundis
Bram Stoker (1890s, Ireland)
Dracula
Sigmund Freud (1900s, psychologist)
Interpretation of Dreams
Kenneth Grahame (1900s)
Wind in the Willows
Edmond Rostand (1900s, France, playwright)
Cyrano de Bergerac
Anton Checkov (1900s, Russia, playwright)
Rabindranath Tagore (1910s, India, poet)
Gitanjali
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1890s)
Yellow Wallpaper
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Literary Timeline
period
*sub-period*
notes
british
american
world
Edwardian (Europe)
1900 - 1920
man vs. nature
J. M. Barrie (1900s)
Peter Pan
W. E. B. Dubois (1900s, black journalist,
autobiography)
Joseph Conrad (1900s)
Heart of Darkness
George Bernard Shaw (1900s, Ireland, reformist
socialist)
Pygmalian
Frank Norris (1900s)
McTeague
Thomas Hardy (1900s, naturalism)
Tess of the d’Ubervilles, Far from the Madding
Crowd, Return of the Native
Jack London (1900s)
Call of the Wild, White Fang, To Build a Fire
Marxism
Naturalism
(America)
1900 - 1920
Darwinism
Beatrix Potter (1900s, naturalist)
Tale of Peter Rabbit
Modern
1910 - 1950
experimental
*Harlem
Renaissance*
1920 - 1930
technology
H. G. Wells (1910s, science fiction)
Time Machine, Island of Doctor Moreau,
Invisible Man, War of the Worlds
magic realism
D. H. Lawrence (1910s)
Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
World War I
1910s
World War II
1940s
independence of British colonies
black migration to northern
cities
Virginia Woolf (1920s)
Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando,
Room of One’s Own
Aldous Huxley (1930s)
Brave New World
George Orwell (1940s, aka Eric Blair)
Animal Farm, 1984
T. H. White (1940s, fantasy)
Once and Future King
Edith Wharton (1910s)
Ethan Frome
John Dewey (1910s, pragmatism)
How We Think
T. S. Eliot (1920s)
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Waste Land
Robert Frost (1920s, poet)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1920s, poet)
Countee Cullen (1920s, black poet)
Willa Cather (1920s, frontier life)
My Antonia
Sherwood Anderson (1920s)
Winesburg, Ohio
gospel, jazz, blues music
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920s, lost generation)
Great Gatsby
literary criticism =
“new criticism,” close reading of
text, self-contained
Sinclair Lewis (1920s)
Babbitt
Rainer Maria Rilke (1910s, Austria, poet)
Franz Kafka (1910s, Germany)
Trial, Castle, Metamorphosis
William Butler Yeats (1920s, Ireland, poet)
James Joyce (1920s, Ireland)
Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake
Oswald Spengler (1920s, Germany)
Decline of the West
Jorge Luis Borges (1930s, Argentina, poet)
Isak Dinesen (1940s, aka Karen Blixen, Denmark)
Out of Africa
Albert Camus (1940s, France, absurdism)
Stranger
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1940s, France)
Little Prince
Theodore Dreiser (1920s)
Sister Carrie, American Tragedy
Carl Sandburg (1920s, poet, Lincoln biographer)
E. E. Cummings (1920s, poet, unusual grammar)
W. H. Auden (1930s, previously British, poet)
Thornton Wilder (1930s, novelist, playwright)
Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town, Skin of Our
Teeth
Gertrude Stein (1930s)
Gwendolyn Brooks (1930s, black poet)
Ernest Hemmingway (1930s, lost generation)
Farewell to Arms, Sun also Rises, For Whom the
Bell Tolls, Old Man and the Sea
William Faulkner (1930s)
Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom,
Absalom!
William Carlos Williams (1930s, poet)
Red Wheelbarrow, Spring and All
Nathanael West (1930s)
Miss Lonelyhearts, Day of the Locust
Dashiell Hammett (1930s, mystery)
Maltese Falcon
Dylan Thomas (1940s)
Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1940s, Florida)
Yearling
John Steinbeck (1940s)
Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath
Zora Neale Hurston (1940s, black)
Their Eyes were Watching God
Langston Hughes (1940s, black poet)
Tennessee Williams (1940s, playwright)
Glass Menagerie, Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Iguana
Lillian Hellman (1940s, playwright)
Children’s Hour, Little Foxes, Toys in the Attic)
Ayn Rand (1940s, Objectivism)
Anthem, Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged
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Literary Timeline
period
*sub-period*
notes
british
american
Post-Modern
1950 -
post World War II prosperity
William Golding (1950s)
Lord of the Flies
Saul Bellow (1950s)
Adventures of Augie March
media culture
ethnic / female writers
literary criticism =
“reader response” - 1960s,
reader is active agent
“new historicism” - 1980s,
culturally and time sensitive
“marxist” - political
“feminist”
world
Pablo Naruda (1950s, Chile, Communist, poet)
Czeslaw Milosz (1950s, Poland, anti-Stalinism)
Captive Mind
J. R. R. Tolkein (1950s, fantasy)
Hobbit, Lord of the Rings
Robert Penn Warren (1950s, New Criticism)
All the King’s Men
C. S. Lewis (1950s, fantasy)
Chronicles of Narnia
James Baldwin (1950s, black, gay)
Primo Levi (1950s, Holocaust survivor)
If This is a Man
Vladimir Nabokov (1950s)
Lolita
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1960s, Russia)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer
Ward, Gulag Archipelago
J. D. Salinger (1950s)
Catcher in the Rye
Nadine Gordimer (1970s, South Africa)
Conservationist, July’s People
Ralph Ellison (1950s, black)
Invisible Man
Arthur Miller (1950s, playwright)
Death of a Salesman, Crucible, View from the
Bridge
Ray Bradbury (1950s, science fiction, fantasy)
Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something
Wicked this way Comes
Eugene O’Neill (1950s, playwright)
Jack Kerouac (1950s, beat)
On the Road, Dharma Burns, Big Sur
Shirley Jackson (1950s, mystery, horror)
Lottery
Flannery O’Connor (1950s)
Truman Capote (1960s)
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood
Madeleine L’Engle (1960s, fantasy)
Wrinkle in Time
Harper Lee (1960s)
To Kill a Mockingbird
Elie Weisel (1960s, Holocaust survivor)
Night
Joseph Heller (1960s, satire)
Catch-22
John Knowles (1960s)
Separate Peace
Ken Kesey (1960s, beat)
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes a
Great Notion
Sylvia Plath (1960s, poet)
Bell Jar, Ariel
Doris Lessing (1960s)
Golden Notebook
Chain Potok (1960s, rabbi)
Chosen
Kurt Vonnegut (1970s)
Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of
Champions
Maya Angelou (1970s, black)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Toni Morrison(1970s, black)
Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved
Rudolfo Anaya (1970s, Chicano)
Bless Me, Ultima
Leslie Marmon Silko (1970s, Native American)
Ceremony
N. Scott Momaday (1970s, Native American)
House Made of Dawn
John Updike (1980s)
Rabbit, Run, Witches of Eastwick
Maxine Hong Kingston (1980s, Chinese)
China Men
Rita Dove (1980s, black)
Thomas and Beulah
Alice Walker (1980s)
Color Purple
Sandra Cisneros (1980s, Mexican)
House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek
and Other Stories
Louise Erdich (1990s, Native American)
Love Medicine
Amy Tan (1990s, Asian-American)
Joy Luck Club
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