English Literature Timeline

-- Old English literature (500-1100)

Historic background:

- Germanic invasion of the Angles, the Jutes, and the Saxons in the 5th century;

- Norman-French invasion in 1066;

- conversion to Christianity by St. Augustine of Canterbury started in 597.

Literature:

- Poetry: alliterative, with kennings

- "Beowulf" (c. 700);

- "The Battle of Maldon" (soon after 991);

- Cynewulf "The Fates of the Apostles" and "Elene" (before 940);

- Caedmon "Caedmon's Hymn" (600's).

- Prose: - King Alfred the Great of Wessex (800's);

- St. Bede the Venerable "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" (731)

- "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" (from about 892 to 1154).

-- Middle English period (12^th --15^th centuries)

Historic background:

- Norman-French invasion in 1066;

- French replaced English;

- English again the language of the ruling classes in 14^th century.

Literature:

- Poetry: - romances on Charlemagne, Troy, and the Arthurian legends

- "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (1370?).

- "The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman" (late 1300s). - "Pearl" (late 1300s)

- Geoffrey Chaucer "The Canterbury Tales" (after 1387) iambic pentameter

- ballads (e.g. about Robin Hood).

- Drama: - miracle and morality plays (1400's)

- Prose: - Thomas Malory "Le Morte Darthur", or "The Death of Arthur" (1469-1470)

-- Elizabethan Literature (16^th century):

Historic background:

- Emergence of Modern English;

- Queen Elizabeth I, last of the Tudor House;

- colonial riches make London the cultural capital

- Renaissance

- introduction of printing by William Caxton in 1476;

- 1^st English playhouse called The Theatre built by James Burbage in 1576,

Literature:

- Poetry: - lyric: - Thomas Campion "Books of Airs" (1601 to about 1617)

- sonnet - Thomas Wyatt, Italian sonnet

- Henry Surrey, English sonnet

- Sir Philip Sidney: sonnet cycle, or sequence, "Amoretti" (1595)

- narrative poem - William Shakespeare "Venus and Adonis" (1593)

- Edmund Spenser "The Faerie Queene" (1590, 1596, 1609)

- translation - Henry Surrey "Aeneid", blank verse

- Drama: - Thomas Kyd and his "Spanish Tragedy" (1580s)

- "University Wits"

- Christopher Marlowe "Tamburlaine the Great" (about 1587),

"The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" (about 1588).

- William Shakespeare "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Macbeth," "Richard III,"

"Midsummer Dream,"

- Prose:

- essay - Sir Thomas More "Utopia" (1516)

- pastorals.

-- The Stuarts and the Puritans (1603-1660)

Historic background:

- Puritan Parliament closed the London theaters in 1642-1660,

- Death of Queen Elizabeth I;

- Rule of King James VI of Scotland

; - Rule of King Charles I of the House of Stuarts

- Civil War 1642-1648 between the Cavaliers and the Puritans

- Puritans rule until 1660

Literature:

- Poetry: - metaphysical poets: John Donne

- Cavalier poets; Thomas Carew, - Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace

- John Milton "Paradise Lost" (1667)

- Drama: - Ben Jonson "Volpone" (1606) and "The Alchemist" (1610)

- Prose: - "Authorized Version of the Bible", also called the "King James Bible" (1611)

- philosophical essays and tracts (early and mid-1600's)

-- The Restoration Period (17^th century)

Historic background:

- Charles II restored to the throne in 1660

- reaction against Puritanism

Literature:

- Poetry: - John Dryden: heroic couplet

- Drama:

- comedy of manners

- John Dryden "Marriage a la Mode" (1672)

- William Congreve with his "The Way of the World" (1700).

- heroic tragedy

John Dryden "All for Love" (1677)

- Prose: - John Dryden "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1668)

- Samuel Pepys' diaries

- John Bunyan "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1678, 1684)

-- The Augustan Age (1700--1750) and the Age of Johnson (1750--1784)

Historic background:

- Influence of Greek and Latin classics, especially Virgil, Horace, and Ovid

- Age of Alexander Pope (about 1700 to 1744)

- Age of Samuel Johnson followed

Literature:

- Poetry:

- satire: Alexander Pope "The Rape of the Lock" (1712), "The Dunciad" (1728),

"Essay on Man" (1733-1734), "Moral Essays" (1731-1735)

- Robert Burns "Auld Lang Syne" (1788), "Comin Thro' the Rye" (about 1796)

- William Blake "Songs of Innocence" (1789), "Songs of Experience" (1794)

- Drama: - Richard Sheridan "The Rivals" (1775), "The School for Scandal" (1777)

- Prose:

- satire: Jonathan Swift "A Tale of a Tub" (1704),

"The Battle of the Books" (1704), "Gulliver's Travels" (1726)

- essay: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator"

- novel:

- Daniel Defoe "Robinson Crusoe" (1719), "Moll Flanders" (1722)

- Samuel Richardson "Pamela" (1740)

- Henry Fielding "Shamela" (1741), "Tom Jones" (1749)

- Tobias Smollett

- Laurence Sterne "Tristram Shandy" (1760-1767)

- Horace Walpole "The Castle of Otranto" (1764).

- non-fiction:

- Samuel Johnson "Dictionary of the English Language" (1755)

- Samuel Johnson "The Lives of the English Poets" (1779-1781)

- James Boswell "The Life of Samuel Johnson" (1791)

- Samuel Johnson "Rasselas" (1759)

-- Romanticism (late 18^th -- early 19^th century)

Literature:

- Poetry:

- William Wordsworth

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge "Lyrical Ballads" (1798)

- George Gordon Byron "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1812-1818),

"Don Juan" (1819-1824);

- Percy Bysshe Shelley "Prometheus Unbound" (1820);

- John Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819), "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819)

- Prose:

- essay:

- Coleridge "Biographia literaria" (1817)

- Charles Lamb "Essays of Elia" (1823), "Last Essays of Elia" (1833)

- novel:

- Thomas De Quincey "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" (1821)

- Jane Austen "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Emma" (1816)

- Sir Walter Scott, the Waverley series

-- The Victorian Age (1837-1901)

Historic background:

- Queen Victoria's coronation in 1837 and death in 1901

- Height of the British Empire

- Scientific advance

- Industrial revolution

Literature:

- Poetry:

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson "Idylls of the King," "In Memoriam" (1850)

- Robert Browning "The Ring and the Book" (1868-1869)

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (1850)

- Matthew Arnold "The Scholar-Gypsy" (1853)б "Dover Beach" (1867)

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the Pre-Raphaelites)

- William Morris

- Drama:

- Oscar Wilde "The Importance of Being Earnest" (1895)

- George Bernard Shaw "Pygmalion."

- Arthur Wing Pinero

- Prose:

- essay: - John Ruskin

- Thomas Carlyle "Sartor Resartus" (1833-1834)

- Mathew Arnold "Culture and Anarchy" (1869)

- novel: - Charles Dickens "Oliver Twist" (1837-1839),

"David Copperfield" (1849-1850), "Bleak House" (1852-1853)

- William Makepeace Thackeray "Vanity Fair" (1847-1848)

- Emily Bronte "Wuthering Heights" (1847)

- Charlotte Bronte "Jane Eyre" (1847)

- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) "Middlemarch" (1871-1872);

- George Meredith "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" (1859)

- Anthony Trollope "Barsetshire Novels", "Barchester Towers" (1857);

- Thomas Hardy."The Mayor of Casterbridge" (1886),

"Jude the Obscure" (1895) .

- Robert Louis Stevenson

- Rudyard Kipling,

- Joseph Conrad

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1633