| Term | Definition |
| The Classical Period | 1200 BCE - 455 CE. Oral tradition: The Iliad and The Odyssey. Greece's Golden Age and Rome's Imperial Period. |
| The Medieval Period | 455 CE - 1485 CE. the "Dark Ages" , Old and Middle English periods. |
| Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period | 428 - 1100
c. 700 - Beowulf (no author)
c. 1307-1321 - Dante's Divina Commedia |
| The Middle English Period | 1350 - 1500
c. 1387. Chaucer, "Prologue" to Canterbury Tales
(1492 Columbus lands in America) |
| The Renaissance (in England, Colonial America) | 1500 - 1660 CE. marked by the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare, and the rebirth of classical learning.
-Settlement of Jamestown, Virginia
1532- Machiavelli
1539- English Bible "great bible"
1564-1616 - Life of William Shakespeare
1601- Hamlet |
| Neoclassical/Enlightenment Period (The Long 18th Century) | 1660 - 1798. reverence for logic and disdain for superstition. House of restoration Period, The Augustan Age, The Age of Johnson, and the Colonial period in America |
| Neoclassical/Enlightenment Important Works | 1667- John Milton, Paradise Lost
1726- Johnathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels- SATIRE
1755- Ben Johnson Dictionary
1783-85- Noah Webster, Grammatical Institute of the English Language
LITERACY EMERGING |
| Romantic Period | 1798-1832. writing about nature, imagination, and individuality dominated.
1811- Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (light)
1817- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (dark)
1830- Edgar Allan Poe, POEms (dark)
reaching for an ideal |
| Early Victorian Age | 1832-1870. Sentimental novel, intellectual movements, Naturalist writers, and Aestheticism, and "The Decadence"
1847- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
(Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet B. Stowe)
1855- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass |
| The Realistic Period (American Literature) | 1865-1914. Reaction to victorian and romantic periods. uses reality and logic. right after civil war. REAL
1867- Karl Marx, Das Kapital (communist)
1876- Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
1884- Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn |
| Natural and Symbolic Period (America Only) | 1900- theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie |
| Edwardian Period (England) | 1901-1910. Reflect on social conditions. poor vs wealthy. attacked social injustice
1903- Jack London, Call of the Wild
1913- Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
Nature vs man
Bernard Shaw |
| First World War | 1914-1918.
1917-TS Eliot, "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock"-epic poem
Earnest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises. 1st account of the war via reporter, not solider |
| The Second World War | 1939-1945.
1946- George Orwell, Animal Farm
1958- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart *gives insight on African and British cultures mixed* |
| Postmodernistic Period | 1956-Today. experimental, metafiction, fragmented poetry; magical realist
1966- Sylvia Plath, Ariel
1969- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. *gives insight on housewives and the sadness of being a "lady"*
1989- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club. |
