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A Brief Outline of English Literature

Literary Periods & Movements

Old English Period ( 5th Century to 1150)

1. Picts – Early inhabitants of England.

2. Brythones occupied majority of the population England before Roman Conquest
3. Romans invade England during 1st Century
4. Romans left British which led to invaders from the north ( Germanic Tribes - Jutes, Saxon,
Angles)
5. West Germanic Language spoken by Angles
6. Four Dialects of old English : West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish
7. St. Augustine came to England in fifth century and Christianity became a new religion in
England
8. Alfred the Great – the first English king (849-899) is called The Father of English Prose
9. Old English Period came to an end after the Norman Conquest in 1066 AD
10. Important works are Beowulf (Epic poem), Widsith , of The Ruin, The Seafarer, The
wanderer, The White Lament, and Judith
11. The Exeter book was collection of literature written in old English period.
12. Most of the works were anonymous
13. Works were mostly about Complaint and Laments and some were on religious themes

Middle English Period (1150 – 1350)

1. Begins after Norman Conquest - Duke of Normandy in the Battle of Hastings

2. Feudal System was introduced by Normandy.
3. Anglo Saxon was spoken by majority of the people.
4. French and Latin became the language of the ruling class and educated people.
5. Latin was the Language of Church’
6. In 1215, King John sealed the Magna Carta (Great Charter)
7. Three main types of Medieval Drama
a) Mystery Plays - about Bible Stories
b) Miracle Plays - about lives of saints and miracles performed by the
c) Morality Plays - Semi Religious – Moral lesson through personification of Vices
and virtues

Age of Chaucer (1350- 1450)

1. Black death (1348) and Hundred years war (1337-1453) affected the normal life of the people.
2. Chaucer wrote many of the works including the Prolougue to Canterbury Tales
3. Other important poets were William Langland ( The vision of William concerning Piers the
Plowman) and John Gower.
4. Important prose writers were John Wycliff (who translated the bible into English) and Sir John
Mandeville.
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5. Three groups of poets were :

English Chaucerians: John Lydgate, Thomas Occleve, Benedict Burgh, George Ashby,
Henry Bradshaw, George Ripley.
Scottish Chaucerians: James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas
Chivalric Romances: Any medival Romance written in verse or metre.

From Chaucer to Spencer 1450-1550

1. War of roses (1455 -1485) affected the normal life of the people.
2. Henry VII ascended to the throne – Marked the beginning of Tudor Dynasty (ruled for 118
years)
3. No important works were produced during this period.
4. Renaissance spread all over the Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453

Elizabethan Era(1550 - 1630)

1. Revival of Classical Learning

2. Political stability maintained.
3. Church of England that started during Henry VIII was revived and Roman Catholicism was
crushed.
4. Renaissance entered England
5. Plays became more important.
6. Guten berg invented Printing machine in 1454 and it was established in England in 1476 by
William Caxton
7. Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in Latin and first published in 1516. English translation was
published in 1551
8. First dramatic comedy John Heywood’s Ralph Roister Doister performed in 1553
9. Reformation and Counter Reformation
Martin Luther King translated The Bible into German while Erasmus and William Tindale
gave a English translation. Counter Reformation started with St. Ignatius of Loyola founding
the Society of Jesus in 1540
10. Edmund Spencer,Shakespeare, Philip Sydney, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Francis Beaumont
and John Fletcher were the prominent writers of the age.
11. John Donne started the Metaphysical School of Poetry
12. Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet in English while Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
introduced the blank verse. Both Wyatt and Surrey’s poem were published in Tottel’s
Miscellany in 1557.
13. University wits: (Total 7) (Playwrights)
Oxford University: John lyly. Thomas Lodge, George Peele
Cambridge University: Christopher Marlowe, Robert Green, Thomas Nash.
Thomas Kyd though under university wits, did not read in any University.
14. Authorised version of King James Bible was published in 1611.
15. In 1603, James 1 ascended to the throne which marked the beginning of Stuart Dynasty.
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Production of Bible:

1. Bede Translated Gospel of St. John into Old English Prose

2. 1382- John Wycliffe Bible was published
3. 1525- William Tyndale Bible was published
4. 1535 – Miles Coverdale published the bible which is the first complete bible to be on print.
5. 1539- The Great Bible – The first Authotised Version was published under the Supervision
of Henry VIII
6. 1560 - Geneva Bible
7. 1568 – Bishop’s Bible
8. 1611 – King James Authorised Version.

Age of Milton (1630- 1660)

1. The whole period covered by Civil war and Commonwealth Rule by Oliver Cromwell
2. Milton was the most prominent writer of the age.
3. Metaphysical Poets (1633-1680): John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry
Vaughan, Thomas Carew, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marwell
4. Cavalier Poets: Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling
5. Theatres were closed on Moral and religious ground

Age of Restoration (1660- 1700)

1. Charles II was restored

2. Two important events: 1665 – Plague, 1666 – Great fire of England.
3. Dryden was the most prominent writer of the age. He wrote heroic plays
4. Comedy of Manners was popularised by Richard Sheridan and William Congreve
5. Diary writing and letter writing were became popular.
6. Restoration Comedy plays: William Congreve, William Wycherley, Sir John vanburgh and
Thomas Shadwell.
7. Samuel Butler was the most prominent poet and John Bunyan was the most prominent
prose writer off the age
8. Diarists :Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn

Age of Pope. Augustan Age (1700-1750) – Age of Prose

1. It is also called as Age of Enlightment or Age of reason

2. Sense of Equality and Science played important role in the lives of the people
3. Jomathan swift, Joseph Addison Sir Richard Steele, Alfred Ben and Daniel Defoe were the
prominent prose and novel writers of the age.
4. Alexander pope was prominent poet of this Age.
5. Age of Reason (1660- 1790): writers include Thomas Hobbes, John Lock, Jean Jacques
Rousseau and Rene Descartes.

Age of Transition or Age of Sensiblity (1750- 1800)

1. Poetry drifts towards Romanticism.

2. Poets give important to intuition, feeling and sublime
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3. Samuel Johnson who belongs to reactionary school compiled the English Dictionary in 1755
4. The Transitional Poets of the age were James Thompson and Oliver Goldsmith
5. Robert burns, the national poet of the Scotland and William Blake belongs to the New
School of Poetry.
6. Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding were the most prominent novelists of the age.
7. Others writers of the age were Edward Gibbon – The Historian, Edmund Broke - a
prominent prose writer, Richard Brinsley Sheridan – the dramatists
8. Gothic Fiction: Horror novels. Horrace Wallpole’s The Castle of Otranto(1764),
Mary Sheeley’s Frankenstein, Allen Poe Stort Stories, Clara Reve’s The old English Baron, Ann
Radcliff’s The Mysteries of Udolopho

Age of Romanticism (1790-1830)

1. Two important Events : French Revolution and Englisgh Industrial Revolution.

2. Romanticism: Writers celebrated the imagination, subjectivity and the beauty of the nature
British Romantic Writers: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, John keats jane Austen, William Blake,
American Romantic Writers: Nathaniel Hawthrone, Herman Melville, Edgar allen Poe,
William Cullen Byrant and John Greenleaf Whittier
3. Robert Southey, Thomas More and Thomas Campbell, Leigh Hunt were the other famous
poet of the age.
4. Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen were the prominent writers of the age.
5. Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt were the famous prose writers of the age.

Victorian Age: (1830- 1890)

1. Struggle between Workers and Capitalists

2. Industrialisation and urbanisation played a major role in Victorian literature.
3. Victorian literature reflects changing social, political economical and cultural climate.
4. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert browning, Elizabeth Browning and Mathew Arnold were the
most prominent poets of the age
5. Victorian age is the age of novels
6. Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, The
Bronte Sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) George Eliot, George Meredith, Benjamin Disraeli
were the most prominent novelists of the age.
7. Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Barrington Macaulay, John Ruskin, Ralph Waldo Emerson were the
most eminent prose writers of the age.
8. Pre Raphhaelite Brotherhood - founded in 1848 by , William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, , John Everett Millais. Four others joined the group later.
They were - William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephen and
Thomas woolner.
9. Realism(1830-1900)Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy
10. Aestheticism (1835- 1910): Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater
11. Transcendentalism (1835- 1860) Prominent in America, Ralph Waldo Emerson and David
Thoreau were the prominent writers
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The Birth of Modern Literature (1890- 1918)

1. The novel writers of the age were - Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Herbert Goerge Wells,
Samuel Butler! Rudyard Kipling
2. George Bernardshaw was the noteworthy playwright and W B Yeats was the noteworthy
poet of the age. of the age.
3. G K Chesterton and WH Hudson wrote many famous prose pieces during the age.
4. War poets : Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and Charles
Sorley
5. Bloomsbery Group: Those writers who lived on the bloomsberry part of the London and
proposed liberalisation on british culture.
Writers: Clive Bell, E M Foster, Roger Fry, Lyttton Strachey, Virginia woolf,

The Inter War Years or Modern Period (1918- 1939)

1. Modern period rises out of scepticism and disillusion of capitalism . It focuses more on
irrational philosophy and Psycho-Analysis
2. D H Lawerence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, E M Forster were the eminent novelists of
the age.
3. The most famous poet of the age were G M Hopkis, T S Eliot, W H Auden,
4. Stream of Consciousness: D H Lawerence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
5. Dadaism - An Avant Grade Movement that began in the devastation of World war I. They
produced nihilistic and Anti - logical prose. Tristan Tzara led the group in paris.
6. Lost Generatiom (1918 1930s)- F Scott Fitzgerald, john dos passos, Ernest Hemingway

Important Literary Movements

Absurd Theatre (1930- 1970): Theatres concerning Meaninglessness of Human life. Albert Camus uses
the term Absurd in 1942 in his essay “ The Myth of Sisyphus”, While Martin Esslin coined the term The
Theatre of Absurd in 1960
Writers: Samuel Backkett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Fredrich Duerrnment Edward
Albee,Valclav Havel.

Angry Young Man (1950 -1980): Working and Middle Class Playwrights and Novelists. Word coined by
Royal Court Theatre- Press officer. John Osborne and Kingsley Amis were the prominent members of the
group.

Aestheticism Movement: Originated in France, in mid 19th Century. Oppose the dominance of Scientific
thinking, does not give importance to moral in the work of Art. A work of art is beautiful in itself and does
not need any moral value.

Comedy : Types of Comedy

a) Romantic Comedy : Famous during Elizabethan age. Example Shakesphere’s Comedy Plays
b) Satiric Comedy : Also called as Corrective Comedy. It ridiculous the violators of Morals and
manners. Eg Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Alchemy
c) Comedy of Humour: Develpped by Ben Jonson based on Ancient physiological theory of
Four Homours. ( Blood, Phlegm, Choler, and Meloncholy)
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d) Comedy of Manner : Famous during Restoration Period. It deals with relations and intrigues
of men and women living in a sophisticated upper class society. Ex. William Congreve’s Way
of the World.
e) Farce: A type of comedy which aims to provoke hearty laughter among the audience.
eg. Shakespeares Taming of the Shrew

Epic Theatre: Introduced by Betolt Brecht,in 1920s. It provokes reaction from the audience.

Gothic Novel: Introduced by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. The name was influenced by Gothic
Architecture.- a medival type of Architecture.

Graveyard Poet: 18th Century poets , who wrote meditative poems set in grave yard, on the theme of
Human Mortality.

Post Colonial Studies: Study of Cultural influences of Colonialism and imperialism, focusing on
exploitation of human and land in colonized countries.

Pre-Raphalities Brotherhood: In1848, a group of poets including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, organized the
movement. It aims at simplicity, truthfulness and spirit of devotion to painting and other works of art.

Surrealism : It followed Dadaism. It focused mainly on the cruelties of First World War