TIMELINE OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
This is a brief, and by no means comprehensive, overview of literature from the major time periods of British literacy history. This is just to give students an overall context. Any author or work with an asterisk beside it is included in the assigned course readings.
Anglo-Saxon Period (449-1066)
Most of the storytelling in this time period was of the oral tradition. There are few written manuscripts that still survive. The major themes of this time were praise of heroes who triumph in battle and religious/moral instruction. The predominant genre in this time period was epic poetry.
Work: Beowulf
Medieval Period (1066-1485)
This was the time of knights and their ladies fair. The chivalric code of honor was very important to literature of this time, and romances became popular. Religion was still a major reason for literature, as well, and plays that instructed the illiterate masses in moral codes, called morality plays, were produced. One of the major genres of this period was the folk ballad.
Author:
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Cerca 1390)
The Renaissance (1485-1660)
This time period marks a shift in literature from a focus on religion and the afterlife to human life on earth. Two of the most popular themes of the time were love and human potential. Genres in use at this time included metaphysical poetry, sonnets, and drama written in verse.
Major Author:
William Shakespeare (born 1564)
Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queene (1590)
William Shakespeare, (Romeo and Juliet (1597)
William Shakespeare, (Macbeth (1603)
Other major authors: John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, and Andrew Marvell
The Restoration (1660-1798)
The Restoration was a time where the emphasis was on rules, reason, and logic. This is the time period of grammarians, the men who created many of the grammar rules that are still in use today. During this time some of the predominant genres were: satire, essays and novels.
Major Author:
Daniel Defoe
Authors:
Alexander Pope
Jonathan Swift
Samuel Johnson
Romanticism (1798-1832)
The major theme of the Romantic period was nature. The Romantics saw patterns and meaning in the natural world around them. This was a time of lyrical ballad. Also, the Romantic period brought to popularity the gothic horror novel.
Major Author:
William Wordsworth
Authors
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, (1818)
Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819)
Jane Austen,
William Blake,
William Wordsworth,
Dorothy Wordsworth,
Samuel Coleridge,
Percy Shelley,
John Keats
Transcendental movement (1830-1860)
The adherents to Transcendentalism believed that knowledge could be arrived at not just through the senses, but through intuition and contemplation of the internal spirit. As such, they professed skepticism of all established religions, believing that Divinity resided in the individual, and the mediation of a church was cumbersome to achieving enlightenment. The father of the movement, an appellation he probably did not relish, was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Major Author
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Authors
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)
Margareth Fuller, Woman in the 19th century (1845)
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden,(1854)
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
The Victorian Period (1832-1900)
It was in this time period that the novel began its rise in popularity. The availability of cheap paper made mass publication possible. Serialized novels and magazines were popular with the masses. Contrived plot twists such as strained coincidences and romantic triangles were often utilized. This time period also saw a heightened conflict between the rich and the poor. In poetry elegies were extremely popular.
Major Author
Charlotte Bronte
Authors:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1849)
Robert Browning, Men and women (1855)
George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861)
Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
Rudyard Kipling
Robert Louis Stevenson
Oscar Wilde
The Modern/Post Modern Period of Literature (1900-1980)
This era heralded the loss of the hero in literature. One of the major themes was technology’s destruction of society. Poetry began to be written in a style called free verse. Many novelists began writing in a style called stream of consciousness. Many works from this time period contain “epiphanies.”
Major Author
James Joyce
Authors:
Joseph Conrad
D.H. Lawrence
Dylan Thomas
George Orwell
William Butler Yeats
Virginia Woolf
Realism (1850–1900)
Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life. A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. Examines realities of life, human frailty; regional culture (local color).
Major Author
Stephen Crane
Authors: Stephen Crane , The Red Badge of Courage
Willa Cather, O, Pioneers
Emily Dickinson,“Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Existentialism (1850-today)
Existentialismis a philosophy that emphasizesindividual existence,freedomandchoice. It is the view that humansdefine their own meaningin life, and try to makerational decisionsdespite existing in anirrational universe. It focuses on the question ofhuman existence, and the feeling that there isno purposeorexplanationat the core of existence. It holds that, as there isno Godor any othertranscendent force, the only way tocounterthis nothingness (and hence to findmeaningin life) is byembracingexistence.
Thus, Existentialism believes that individuals are entirelyfreeand must takepersonal responsibilityfor themselves (although with this responsibility comesangst, a profound anguish or dread). It therefore emphasizesaction,freedomanddecisionas fundamental, and holds that the only way to rise above the essentiallyabsurd conditionof humanity (which is characterized bysufferingandinevitable death) is by exercising our personalfreedom and choice.
Major Author
Jean-Paul Sartre
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus"(1942)
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex(1949)
Sartre, Being and Nothingness(1943)
Modernism (1910-1965)
The beginning of the 20th century was a time of change across the globe. Whether it was rapid growth in city populations, industrialization or global conflict, it was clear that a new and modern world was taking shape.Modernismwas an artistic movement that grew out of this changing landscape of life during this time. Modernism, for the most part, represented the struggle that many had with the way that new ideas and discoveries challenged their previous lives during a time when tradition didn't seem so important anymore.
This artistic movement grew strength first in Europe in the early 20th century, eventually growing in the United States. It was fueled by domestic shifts (increase in city life, technology and wealth, for example) as well as changes on an international scale (like World War I). As this stable structure of a strong, patriotic nation began to weaken, so did the writing of the time reflect the uncertainty of its citizens. Growth, prosperity, fear, war, death, money, materialism, psychology and disillusionment all contributed to the creation of a modern literary movement in the United States. One that was very much a reflection of the unease of a people who felt that the old rules and the old ways of living and thinking were no longer relevant.
Major Author
T.S. Eliot
Authors :
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B”
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Post-modernism (1965-today)
Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.
Authors : Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
Joyce Carol Oates, Bellefleur
J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions