All About English Literature

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Literary Terms , Literary Preiods , Major Literary Figures

List of Literary Movements

Amatory fiction
Romantic fiction written in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Notable authors: Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley
Cavalier Poets

17th century English royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after
Ben Jonson).
Notable authors: Richard Lovelace, William Davenant
Metaphysical poets
17th century English movement using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion.
Notable authors: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell
The Augustans
An 18th century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticism.
Notable authors: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift
Romanticism
1800 to 1860 century movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and
scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment.
Notable authors: Victor Hugo, Lord Byron and Camilo Castelo Branco
Gothic novel
Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined with an interest in the supernatural and in violence.
Notable authors: Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker
Lake Poets
A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublime.
Notable authors: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
American Romanticism
Distinct from European Romanticism, the American form emerged somewhat later, was based more
in fiction than in poetry, and incorporated a (sometimes almost suffocating) awareness of history,
particularly the darkest aspects of American history.
Notable authors: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Pre-Raphaelitism
19th century, primarily English movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter
Raphael. Many were both painters and poets.
Notable authors: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti
Transcendentalism
19th century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance,
independence from modern technology.
Notable authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
Dark romanticism
19th century American movement in reaction to Transcendentalism. Finds man inherently sinful and
self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force.
Notable authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, George Lippard
Realism
Late-19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty
and everyday concerns.
Notable authors: Gustave Flaubert, William Dean Howells, Stendhal, Honor de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy,
Frank Norris and Ea de Queiroz
Naturalism
Also late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control
people.
Notable authors: mile Zola, Stephen Crane

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Symbolism
Principally French movement of the fin de sicle based on the structure of thought rather than
poetic form or image; influential for English language poets from Edgar Allan Poe to James Merrill.
Notable authors: Stphane Mallarm, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valry
Stream of consciousness
Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without
authorial presence.
Notable authors: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
Modernism
Variegated movement of the early 20th century, encompassing primitivism, formal innovation, or
reaction to science and technology.
Notable authors: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Fernando Pessoa
The Lost Generation
It was traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in
the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir A Moveable Feast. It refers to a group of
American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts ofEurope from the time period which saw
the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression.
Notable Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Waldo Pierce
Dada
Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada focused on going against artistic norms and conventions.
Notable authors: Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters
First World War Poets
Poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took
place.
Notable authors: Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke
Stridentism
Mexican artistic avant-garde movement. They exalted modern urban life and social revolution.
Notable authors: Manuel Maples Arce, Arqueles Vela, Germn List Arzubide
Los Contemporneos
A Mexican vanguardist group, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s; published an eponymous
literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928-1931.
Notable authors: Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo
Imagism
Poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the
adequate symbol."
Notable authors: Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington
Harlem Renaissance
African American poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements of blues and folklore,
based in the Harlem neighborhood ofNew York City in the 1920s.
Notable authors: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Surrealism
Originally a French movement, influenced by Surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and
transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious rather than conscious mind.
Notable authors: Jean Cocteau, Dylan Thomas
Southern Agrarians
A group of Southern American poets, based originally at Vanderbilt University, who expressly
repudiated many modernist developments in favor of metrical verse and narrative. Some Southern
Agrarians were also associated with the New Criticism.
Notable authors: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren
Oulipo
Mid-20th century poetry and prose based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added
challenge.
Notable authors: Raymond Queneau, Walter Abish

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Postmodernism
Postwar movement skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony, and word play.
Notable authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Alasdair Gray
Black Mountain Poets
A self-identified group of poets, originally based at Black Mountain College, who eschewed patterned
form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice.
Notable authors: Charles Olson, Denise Levertov
Beat poets
American movement of the 1950s and 1960s concerned with counterculture and youthful alienation.
Notable authors: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey
Hungryalist Poets
A literary movement in postcolonial India (Kolkata) during 1961-65 as a counter-discourse to
Colonial Bengali poetry.
Notable poets:Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury, Binoy Majumdar, Samir Roychoudhury
Confessional poetry
Poetry that, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of
human frailty.
Notable authors: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Alicia Ostriker
New York School
Urban, gay or gay-friendly, leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s.
Notable authors: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery
Magical Realism
Literary movement in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic circumstances. Most
often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the 20th century.
Notable authors: Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Octavio Paz, Gnter Grass, Julio Cortzar
Postcolonialism
A diverse, loosely connected movement of writers from former colonies of European countries,
whose work is frequently politically charged.
Notable authors: Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Giannina Braschi,
Wole Soyinka
Poetry is the expression of a thought, an idea, a concept or a story in a structured form which has a
flow and a music created by the sounds and syllables in it.
Acrostic: Acrostic poetry is one that contains certain letters, which are usually placed at the beginning
of each line. These letters form a message or word when they are read in a sequence.
Ballad: This type of poetry is short and narrative and is made up of stanzas of two to four lines.
Ballads usually have a refrain. They also deal mostly with folklore or popular trends though some also
originate from a wide range of subject matter. The verses in ballads are straight-forward and seldom
have any detail. Apart from that, ballads always possess graphic simplicity and force.
Blank Verse: A blank verse is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. This form is a little like the
rhythms of speech.
Burlesque: In this kind of poetry a subject that is serious in nature is treated as humor.
Cinquain: A cinquain is short poem that is made up of five lines that are usually unrhymed. These five
lines contain two, four, six, eight and two syllables respectively.
Clerihew: This type of poetry is made up of a comic verse that has two couplets and a specific rhyming
scheme.
Didactic Poetry: Didactic poems are poems that are written in order to instruct or teach.
Epic: This type of poem is long and narrative in nature. It talks about the adventures of a hero. Epics
usually deal with the history and traditions of a nation.
Epigram: Practiced by poets like Robert Frost, William Blake and Ben Jonson, epigrams are short
poems that possess satire. This type of poetry ends with a stinging punchline or humorous retort.
Common forms of epigrams are written as a couplet.
Epitaph: A short poem with rhyming lines written on a tombstone in praise of a deceased person is
called an epitaph.

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Elegy: This type of poetry is sad and thoughtful in nature. They talk about the death of an individual.
Free Verse: Like the name suggests, free verse is poetry that is irregular. This type of poetry has
content which is free from the traditional rules of using verse.
Ode: A poem that is written in praise of a place, thing or person, is known as an ode.
Sonnet: A poem that is made up of 14 lines and a particular rhyming scheme is called a sonnet.
Couplet: Perhaps the most popular type of poetry used, the couplet has stanzas made up of two lines
which rhyme with each other.

LIST OF LITERARY PERIOD IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

0450 - 1066: Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period

Major Writers:

Beowulf (Anonymous)

1066 - 1500: Middle English Period

Major Writers:

Geoffrey Chaucer

1500 - 1600: The Renaissance (Early Modern) Period

1558 - 1603: Elizabethan Age
Major Writers:

Christopher Marlowe
Edmund Spenser
Francis Beaumont
John Fletcher
Sir Philip Sidney
Thomas Dekker
Thomas Wyatt
William Shakespeare

1603 - 1625: Jacobean Age

Major Writers:

Ben Jonson
John Webster
Thomas Kyd
George Chapman
John Donne
George Herbert
Emilia Lanyer

1625 - 1649: Caroline Age

Major Writers:

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John Ford
John Milton

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1649 - 1660: Commonwealth Period

Major Writers:

John Milton
Andrew Marvell
Thomas Hobbes

1660 - 1700: Restoration Period

Major Writers:

John Dryden

1700 - 1745: The Augustan Age

Major Writers:

Alexander Pope
Jonathan Swift
Samuel Johnson

1745 - 1783: The Age Of Sensibility

1785 - 1830: The Romantic Period
Major Writers:

William Wordsworth
S.T. Coleridge
Jane Austen
the Bronts

1832 - 1901: The Victorian Period

Major Writers:

Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Robert Browning
Alfred Lord Tennyson

1848 - 1860: The Pre-Raphaelites

Major Writers:

William Holman Hunt

John Everett Millais
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti
James Collinson
Frederic George Stephens
Thomas Woolner

1880 - 1901: Aestheticism and Decadence

1901 - 1910: The Edwardian Period
Major Writers:

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J. M. Barrie
Arnold Bennett
Joseph Conrad
E. M. Forster
John Galsworthy
Kenneth Grahame
Edith Nesbit
Beatrix Potter
Lucy Maud Montgomery
H. G. Wells
P. G. Wodehouse

1910 - 1914: The Georgian Period

Major Writers:

G.M. Hopkins
H.G. Wells
James Joyce
D.H. Lawrence
T.S. Eliot

1914 - 1945: The Modern Period

Major Writers:

Knut Hamsun
James Joyce
Mikhail Bulgakov
T. S. Eliot
Virginia Woolf
John Steinbeck
D. H. Lawrence
Ezra Pound
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Katherine Anne Porter
E. M. Forster
Franz Kafka
Joseph Conrad
W. B. Yeats
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Samuel Beckett
Robert Frost

1945 - Present: Post Modern Period

Major Writers:

Ted Hughes
Doris Lessing
John Fowles
Don DeLillo
A.S. Byatt

SATIRICAL STYLES
1. Direct satire is directly stated
2. Indirect satire is communicated through characters in a situation

TYPES OF SATIRE
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There are two types of satire.

Horatian:

Horatian satire is tolerant, funny, sophisticated witty, wise, self-effacing and aims to correct through
humor. Named for the Roman satirist from the Augustan period in Rome, Horace, this playfully
criticizes some social vice through gentle, mild, and light-hearted humour. It directs wit, exaggeration,
and self-deprecating humour toward what it identifies as folly, rather than evil. Horatian satire's
sympathetic tone is common in modern society.

Juvenalian:

Juvenalian satire is angry, caustic, personal, relentless, bitter, and serious. Named after Augustan
periods Roman satirist Juvenal, this type of satire is more contemptuous and abrasive than the
Horatian. Juvenalian satire provokes a darker kind of laughter; addresses social evil and points with
contempt to the corruption of men and institutions through scorn, outrage, and savage ridicule. This
form is often pessimistic, characterized by irony, sarcasm, moral indignation and personal invective,
with less emphasis on humour.

SATIRICAL DEVICES
1. Humor:

Exaggeration or overstatement: Something that does happen, but is exaggerated

to absurd lengths. This is the most common type of satire. For example, a caricature,
the formalized walk of Charlie Chaplin.

Understatement: A statement that seems incomplete or less than truthful given the
facts. Think sarcasm with the intentions of evoking change. For example, Fieldings
description of a grossly fat and repulsively ugly Mrs. Slipslop: She was not
remarkably handsome.

Incongruity: A marked lack of correspondence or agreement.

Deflation: the English professor mispronounces a word, the President slips and
bangs his head leaving the helicopter, etc.

Linguistic games / Malapropism: A deliberate mispronunciation of a name or

term with the intent of poking fun; weird rhymes, etc.

Surprise: Twist endings, unexpected events

2. Irony: Literary device conveying the opposite of what is expected; in which there is an incongruity
or discordance between what one says or does, and what one means or what is generally understood.
It is lighter, less harsh in wording than sarcasm, though more cutting because of its indirectness. For
example, Marge reading Fretful Mother as she ignores her child.
The ability to recognize irony is one of the surest tests of intelligence and sophistication. Irony speaks
words of praise to imply blame and words of blame to imply praise. Writer is using a tongue-in-cheek
style. Irony is achieved through such techniques as hyperbole and understatement.

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Verbal Irony: Simply an inversion of meaning

Dramatic Irony: When the words or acts of a character carry a meaning

unperceived by himself but understood by the audience. The irony resides in the
contrast between the meaning intended by the speaker and the added significance
seen by others.

Socratic Irony: Socrates pretended ignorance of a subject in order to draw

knowledge out of his students by a question and answer device. Socratic irony is
feigning ignorance to achieve some advantage over an opponent.

Situational Irony: Depends on a discrepancy between purpose and results.

Example: a practical joke that backfires is situational irony.

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3. Invective: Name calling, harsh, abusive language directed against a person or cause.
Invective is a vehicle, a tool of anger. It is the bitterest of all satire.
4. Mock Encomium: Praise which is only apparent and which suggests blame instead.
5. Grotesque: Creating a tension between laughter and horror or revulsion; the essence of all
sick humor: or black humor
6. Comic Juxtaposition: Linking together with no commentary items which normally do not
go together; Popes line in Rape of the Lock: Puffs, patches, bibles, and billet-doux.
7. Mock Epic / Mock Heroic: Using elevated diction and devices from the epic or the heroic
to deal with low or trivial subjects.
8. Parody: A mocking imitation, composition imitating or burlesquing another, usually
serious, piece of work. Designed to ridicule in nonsensical fashion an original piece of work.
Parody is in literature what the caricature and cartoon are in art.
9. Inflation: Taking a real-life situation and blowing it out of proportion to make it ridiculous
and showcase its faults.
10. Diminution: Taking a real-life situation and reducing it to make it ridiculous and
showcase its faults.
11. Absurdity: Something that seems like it would never happen, but could.
12. Wit or word play: The title The Importance of Being Earnest. It is a play on the word
earnest, meaning honest, and the name Earnest.
13. Euphemism: The substitution of an inoffensive term for one that is offensive.
14. 1Travesty: Presents a serious (often religious) subject frivolously it reduces everything to
its lowest level. Trans= over, across vestire = to clothe or dress. Presenting a subject in a
dress intended for another type of subject.
15. Burlesque: Ridiculous exaggeration achieved through a variety of ways. For example, the
sublime may be absurd, honest emotions may be turned to sentimentality. STYLE is the
essential quality in burlesque. A style ordinarily dignified may be used for nonsensical matters,
etc.
16. Farce: Exciting laughter through exaggerated, improbable situations. This usually
contains low comedy: quarreling, fighting, coarse with, horseplay, noisy singing, boisterous
conduct, trickery, clownishness, drunkenness, slap-stick.
17. Sarcasm: A sharply mocking or contemptuous remark. The term came from the Greek
word sarkazein which means to tear flesh.
18. Knaves & Fools: In comedy there are no villains and no innocent victims. Instead, there
are rogues (knaves) and suckers (fools). The knave exploits someone asking for it. When
these two interact, comic satire results. When knaves & fools meet, they expose each other.

MODERN NOVEL

Novel: Most important and popular literary medium. Deals the relations between
loneliness and love.

Modern Novel: Realistic as opposed to idealistic, psychological.

Realistic: Consider truth to observe facts about outer world, about his own feelings.

Idealistic: Create pleasant and edifying picture.

Psychological: Nature of consciousness and its relation to time, made difficult to

think of consciousness, tends to see it as altogether fluid, existing, story becomes
unreal and unsatisfactory,

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Origin of the term: William James coined the phrase to describe the flux of the mind, its continuity
and yet its continuous change.

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Consciousness: An amalgam of that we have experienced and continue to experience. Every thought
is a part of the personal consciousness, unique and ever-changing. We seem to be selective in our
thoughts, selectively attentive or inattentive, focussing attention on certain objects and areas of
experience, rejecting others, totally blocking others out.

Means of escape from tyranny, indicate the precise nature in a limited time, gives a
complete picture of a character both historically and psychologically.
A technique that reveals the character completely historically as well as
psychologically.
Development in character which is difficult.
Character can be presented outside time and place.
First represents the presentation of conscious from chronological sequence of events,
and then investigates a given state of mind so completely.

TECHNIQUE OF CHARACTERISATION
Previous methods: Two different methods were adopted in the delineation of character.
(i) Personalities of characters emerge from a chronological account of events and reactions to it as in
Hardys The Mayor of Casterbridge.
(ii) First a descriptive portrait of the character is given and the resulting actions and reactions
elaborate that picture as in Trollopes Barchester Towers.

Stream of consciousness novelist is responsible for an important development,

dissatisfied with these traditional methods.
Impossible to give a psychological accurate account of a man, interested in dynamic
aspects rather than static.
Present moment is specious denoting the ever fluid passing of the already into the
not yet, gives the reaction to a particular experience at the moment but also his
previous and future reactions.
THE ANGLO-SAXON

(428 1100)

Anglo-Saxon: Angles and Saxon, ancestors of the English race.

Characteristic: Their customs were different from each other as in savagery, sentiment,
rough living and deep feeling, splendid courage and deep melancholy resulting from
unanswered riddle of death.
Life: external and internal rich life, brave and fearless fighters, love of pure glory, happy
domestic life and virtues were their magnetic attractions.
Principles: they had five principles. Love of personal freedom; nature lover; love of
womanhood; struggle for glory. Their literature was full of vivacity due to all these traits.

ANGLO-SAXON POETRY
Most poets of their literature have over-shadowed yet some are left.
1) Waldhere (693-705):
The Fight at Finnesburg: Deals with battle against fearful odds.
Complaint of Deor: Disappointment of a lover.
Beowulf: Epic, distinctively refers to the historical background.
2) Caedmon (657-681): Religious poet, first English poet known by name; sang in series
about the fate of man; from the creation to fall of man and the last Judgment.
3) Cynewulf (757-786): Religious poet
Christ: Metrical narration of leading events of Christs ministry upon earth.

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ANGLO-SAXON PROSE
1. Unlike poetry, no break in prose of Anglo-Saxon period and Middle English period.
2. Through the transcription of Latin Chronicles into English by the King Alfred the great
probably, English prose was established.
3. Two great pioneers: Alfred the Great, the glorious king of Wessex and Aelfric, a priest who
wrote sermons in a sort of poetic prose.
4. Great success is religious instructions.

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ANGLO-SAXON HISTORY
449, traditional date (from Gildas and Bede) for Germanic invasion by Hengist and Horsa
450-700, composition of Old English poems: Beowulf (epic), Finnsburg (fragmentary, related
to Beowulf), Widsith (lyric, account of poet), Deor's Lament (lyric, account of poet), The
Wanderer (reflective poem on fate), The Seafarer (reflective, descriptive lyric on sailor's life),
The Wife's Complaint, The Husband's Message (love poems), Charms
500-700, Christian culture flourishes in Ireland, activity of Irish missionaries in Scotland,
Iceland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy
509, closing of Athenian philosophical schools
524, influential medieval Latin work by Boethius, "Consolation of Philosophy"--would be
translated into English by King Alfred, Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth
570-632, Mohammed
590-604, Pope Gregory the Great (Gregorian Calendar, Gregorian music)
597, the missionary Saint Augustine establishes Christianity in southern England
600-700, establishment of powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
633, The Koran
670, Caedmon, Hymns (first English poet known by name)
700, School of Caedmon"; Beowulf composed in present form
731, Ecclesiastical History (Latin) by The Venerable Bede
750- 800, flourishing Christian poetry in Northumbria (preserved in West Saxon); Cynewulf
and his school: Crist (narrative), Elene (saint's legend), Juliana (Saint's legend in dialogue
form), Fates of the Apostles (saints' legends), Andreus (saint's legend--voyage tale), The
Phoenix (myth interpreted as Christian allegory)
787, first Danish invasion
800, Latin "History of the Britons" by Nennius (Welsh)--first mention of Arthur
800-814, Charlemagne's reign in France
850, Danish conquest
871-901, Alfred the Great; translations of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, Boethius, Orosius,
Bede; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle revised and continued to 892; West Saxon Martyrology;
sermons; saints' lives
875-900, probable beginnings of medieval dram in dramatatization of liturgy
893, Life of Alfred the Great by Asser
901-1066, Chronicle continued; poetry, sermons, Biblical translations and paraphrases,
saints' lives, lyrics
937, Battle of Brunanburh (heroic poem)
950-1000, monastic revival under Dunstan, Aethelwold, and Aelfric
950, Junius MS written, containing Caedmon poems
971, Blickling Homilies
975, St. Ethelwold's Concordia Regularis, directions for acting a trope at Winchester--earliest
evidence of dramatic activity in England
979-1016, second period of Danish invasions
991, Battle of Maldon (heroic poem)
1000-1200, transition from English to Norman French. Decline of Anglo-Saxon heroic verse
and reduced literary activity in English, with some development of medieval English lyrics,
germs of English romances
1000, Anglo-Saxon Gospels; Aelfric's Sermons; Beowulf MS written
1000-1025, The Exeter Book (MS containing Cynewulf poems)

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1000-1100, Vercelli Book (Anglo-Saxon MS); probable period of full development of

Christmas and Easter cycles of plays in Western Europe
1017-1042, Danish kings
1042-1066, Saxon kings restored
1066, Battle of Hastings, Norman conquest
1066-1154, Norman kings
1079-1142, Abelard (French), ecclesiastical philosopher, lover of Heloise
1086, Doomsday Book (English census)
1087-1100, William II--centralization of kingdom
1098-1099, First Crusade
The major literary figures in the English Renaissance include:
Francis Bacon
Thomas Dekker
John Donne
John Fletcher
John Ford
Ben Jonson
Thomas Kyd
Christopher Marlowe
Philip Massinger
Thomas Middleton
Thomas More
Thomas Nashe
William Rowley
William Shakespeare
James Shirley
Philip Sidney
Edmund Spenser
John Webster
Thomas Wyatt

Tudor period
The Tudor period usually refers to the period between 1485 and 1603, specifically in relation to the
history of England. This coincides with the rule of the Tudor dynasty in England whose first monarch
was Henry VII (1457 1509). The term can be used more broadly to include Elizabeth I's reign (1558
1603), although this is often treated separately as the Elizabethan era.
In terms of the entire century, Guy (1988) argues that "England was economically healthier, more
expansive, and more optimistic under the Tudors" than at any time in a thousand years.
The House of Tudor produced six monarchs who ruled during this period.
Henry VII (1485 to 1509)
Henry VIII (1509 to 1547)
Edward VI (1547 to 1553)
Lady Jane Grey (1553) Nominal queen for nine days in failed bid to prevent accession of Mary I.
Not a member of the House of Tudor.
Mary I (1553 to 1558)
Elizabeth I (1558 to 1603)
The Tudors and the Elizabethan Age
The beginning of the Tudor dynasty coincided with the first dissemination of printed matter. William
Caxton's press was established in 1476, only nine years before the beginning of Henry VII's reign.
Caxton's achievement encouraged writing of all kinds and also influenced the standardization of the
English language. The early Tudor period, particularly the reign of Henry VIII, was marked by a break
with the Roman Catholic Church and a weakening of feudal ties, which brought about a vast increase
in the power of the monarchy.
Stronger political relationships with the Continent were also developed, increasing England's
exposure to Renaissance culture. Humanism became the most important force in English literary and
intellectual life, both in its narrow sensethe study and imitation of the Latin classicsand in its broad
sensethe affirmation of the secular, in addition to the otherworldly, concerns of people. These forces
produced during the reign (15581603) of Elizabeth I one of the most fruitful eras in literary history.
The energy of England's writers matched that of its mariners and merchants. Accounts by men such

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as Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, and Sir Walter Raleigh were eagerly read. The activities and
literature of the Elizabethans reflected a new nationalism, which expressed itself also in the works of
chroniclers (John Stow, Raphael Holinshed, and others), historians, and translators and even in
political and religious tracts. A myriad of new genres, themes, and ideas were incorporated into
English literature. Italian poetic forms, especially the sonnet, became models for English poets.
Sir Thomas Wyatt was the most successful sonneteer among early Tudor poets, and was, with
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, a seminal influence. Tottel's Miscellany (1557) was the first and most
popular of many collections of experimental poetry by different, often anonymous, hands. A common
goal of these poets was to make English as flexible a poetic instrument as Italian. Among the most
prominent of this group were Thomas Churchyard, George Gascoigne, and Edward de Vere, earl of
Oxford. An ambitious and influential work was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), a historical verse
narrative by several poets that updated the medieval view of history and the morals to be drawn from
it.
The poet who best synthesized the ideas and tendencies of the English Renaissance was Edmund
Spenser. His unfinished epic poem The Faerie Queen (1596) is a treasure house of romance, allegory,
adventure, Neoplatonic ideas, patriotism, and Protestant morality, all presented in a variety of literary
styles. The ideal English Renaissance man was Sir Philip Sidneyscholar, poet, critic, courtier,
diplomat, and soldierwho died in battle at the age of 32. His best poetry is contained in the sonnet
sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) and his Defence of Poesie is among the most important works of
literary criticism in the tradition.
Many others in a historical era when poetic talents were highly valued were skilled poets. Important
late Tudor sonneteers include Spenser and Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, and Fulke
Greville. More versatile even than Sidney was Sir Walter Raleighpoet, historian, courtier, explorer,
and soldier, who wrote strong, spare poetry.
Early Tudor drama owed much to both medieval morality plays and classical models. Ralph Roister
Doister (c.1545) by Nicholas Udall and Gammer Gurton's Needle (c.1552) are considered the first
English comedies, combining elements of classical Roman comedy with native burlesque. During the
late 16th and early 17th cent., drama flourished in England as never before or since. It came of age
with the work of the University Wits, whose sophisticated plays set the course of Renaissance drama
and paved the way for Shakespeare.
The Wits included John Lyly, famed for the highly artificial and much imitated prose work Euphues
(1578); Robert Greene, the first to write romantic comedy; the versatile Thomas Lodge and Thomas
Nashe; Thomas Kyd, who popularized neo-Senecan tragedy; and Christopher Marlowe, the greatest
dramatist of the group. Focusing on heroes whose very greatness leads to their downfall, Marlowe
wrote in blank verse with a rhetorical brilliance and eloquence superbly equal to the demands of high
drama. William Shakespeare, of course, fulfilled the promise of the Elizabethan age. His history plays,
comedies, and tragedies set a standard never again equaled, and he is universally regarded as the
greatest dramatist and one of the greatest poets of all time.

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