Periods of English literature (short character. )

The Commonwealth

& The Protectorate ( Baroque Style, Rococo Style)

Milton, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Hobbes

1700‐1800 The Eighteenth Century - The Enlightenment

4. Neoclassical Period 1660-1785 (the Restoration, the Augustan Age, and the Age of Sensibility) - John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe.

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5. 1785‐1830 Romanticism (Romantic Period - The Age of Revolution )

William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Brontës, Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley.

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6. 1830‐1901 Victorian Period (The Pre‐Raphaelites (1848‐1860) and the movement of Aestheticism and Decadenc Early, Middle and LateVictorian)

Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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7. 1901‐1960 Modern Period (The Edwardian Era (1901‐1910), The Georgian Era (1910‐1914)) poet Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Dramatists include Noel Coward and Samuel Beckett, G.M. Hopkins, H.G. Wells, James Joyce,D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot

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Postmodern and Contemporary Period

Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, John Fowles,John Arden, Don DeLillo, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Harold Pinter, Robert Oxton Bolt, T. Stoppard

PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (short character.)

Periods in literature are named for rulers, historical events, intellectual or political or religious movements, or artistic styles. Most literary periods therefore have multiple names. Recent histories of literature offer the latest examples of terms applied to literary periods.

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1. The Old English Period or the Anglo ‐Saxon Period refers to the literature produced from the invasion of Celtic England by Germanic tribes in the first half of the fifth century to the conquest of England in 1066 by William the Conqueror. One of the most well‐known eighth century Old English pieces of literature is Beowulf, a great Germanic epic poem.

2. The Middle English Period consists of the literature produced in the four and a half centuries between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and about 1500, when the standard literary language, became recognizable as "modern English." The most widely known of these writings (of secular literature) are Geoffrey Chaucer's» The Canterbury Tales».

3. While the English Renaissance began with the ascent of the House of Tudor to the English throne in 1485, the English Literary Renaissance began with English humanists such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Thomas Wyatt.

In addition, the English Literary Renaissance consists of four subsets: The a) Elizabethan Age, the b) Jacobean Age, c) the Caroline Age, and the d) Commonwealth Period (which is also known as the Puritan Interregnum). The Elizabethan Age of English Literature coincides with the reign of Elizabeth I, 1558 ‐ 1603. Some important writers of the Elizabethan Age include William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser. The Jacobean Age of English Literature coincides with the reign of James I, (1603 ‐ 1625). Shakespeare and Jonson wrote during the Jacobean Age, as well as John Donne, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Middleton. The Caroline Age ( 1625 ‐ 1649). This era produced a circle of poets known as the “Cavalier Poets” and the dramatists of this age were the last to write in the Elizabethan tradition. The Commonwealth Period, also known as the Puritan Interregnum, of English Literature includes the literature produced during the time of Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell. This period produced the political writings of John Milton and Thomas Hobbs.

4. The Neoclassical Period (1660-1785) of English literature was much influenced by contemporary French literature, which was in the midst of its greatest age. The literature of this time is known for its use of philosophy, reason, skepticism, wit, the first great age of English literary criticism.

Much like the English Literary Renaissance, the Neoclassical Period can be divided into three subsets:

the Restoration, the Augustan Age, and the Age of Sensibility

- The Restoration, 1660 ‐ 1700, is marked by the restoration of the monarchy and the triumph of reason and tolerance over religious and political passion. Major writers of the era include John Milton, John Dryden, John Wilmot and John Locke.

- The English Augustan Age derives its name from the brilliant literary period of Virgil and Ovid under the Roman emperor Augustus (27 B.C. ‐ A.D. 14). In English literature, the Augustan Age, 1700 ‐ 1745, refers to literature with the predominant characteristics of refinement, clarity, elegance, and balance of judgment. Well‐known writers of the Augustan Age include Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Daniel Defoe.

- Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of Enlightenment and began to emphasize instinct and feeling, rather than judgment and restraint. (medieval ballads and folk literature).

5.The Romantic Period of English literature began in the late 18th century and lasted until approximately 1832. In general, Romantic literature can be characterized by its personal nature, its strong use of feeling, its abundant use of symbolism, and its exploration of nature and the supernatural. The Romantic Period produced a wealth of authors including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Lord Byron. It was during the Romantic Period that Gothic literature was born. Two of the most famous Gothic novelists are Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley.

6.The Victorian Period of English literature began with the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837, and lasted until her death in 1901. Some of the most recognized authors of the Victorian era include Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Within the Victorian Period, two other literary movements, that of The Pre‐Raphaelites (1848‐1860) and the movement of Aestheticism and Decadence (1880‐1900), gained prominence (Oscar Wilde).

7.The Modern Period applies to British literature written since the beginning of World War I in 1914. The authors of the Modern Period have experimented with subject matter, form, and style and have produced achievements in all literary genres. Poets of the period include Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney. Novelists include James Joyce,D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Dramatists include Noel Coward and Samuel Beckett. Following World War II (1939‐1945),

8.The Postmodern Period of British Literature developed. Postmodernism blends literary genres and styles. While the British literary scene at the turn of the new millennium is crowded and varied, the authors still fall into the categories of modernism and postmodernism.

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MODERNISM

A major British lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Though not a modernist Hardy was is an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th-century. A major novelists of the late 19th-century, Hardy lived well into the third decade of the 20th-century, but because of the adverse criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure, in 1895, from that time Hardy concentrated on publishing poetry. Irishman W. B. Yeats's (1865-1939), career began late in the Victorian era. Yeats was one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured. Yeats is generally considered as one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929.

Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and J.M. Synge (1871-1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw's career began in the last decade of the nineteenth-century, while Synge's plays belong to the first decade of the twentieth-century. Synge's most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, "caused outrage and riots when it was first performed" in Dublin in 1907. George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, "the morality of armaments and war" and the rights of women.

An important dramatist in the 1920s, and later, was Irishman Sean O'Casey (1880-1964). English literary modernism developed out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and belief in the idea of objective truth. The movement was influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.

Then in 1922 Irishman James Joyce's (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941 ) important modernist novel Ulysses appeared. Ulysses has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". Set during one day in Dublin, in it Joyce creates parallels with Homer's epic poem the Odyssey.

William Faulkner's ( born Falkner, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962 ) The Sound and the Fury is another significant modernist novel, that uses the stream of consciousness technique. The modernist movement continued through the 1920s and 1930s and beyond.

Important British writers between the World Wars, include the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), who began publishing in the 1920s, and novelists Virginia Woolf ( 25 January 1882 – 28 March 194 ) and D. H. Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930). Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was published privately in Florence in 1928, though the unexpurgated version was not published in Britain until 1959. Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique in novels like Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own contains her famous dictum; "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".

Catherine Mansfield (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923 ) shows» the complexity of life in her short stories». Children are often chosen as main characters (Chekhov affected her a lot). New Zealander Katherine Mansfield published her first collection of short stories, In a German Pension, in 1911.

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