Historical Survey of the English
Literature
Povijesni pregled engleske
književnosti
INTRODUCTION
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• periods:
• selected according to shared criteria and
features which are considered characteristic of
the time
• overlap (co-existence of diverse movements)
• useful for our understanding and discussion of
connections between literary and socio-
historical developments
• help us compare texts within one period and
across periods
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• 450-1066 Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) Period
1066-1500 Middle English Period
• 1500-1660 The Renaissance (or Early Modern Period)
1558-1603 Elizabethan Age
1603-1625 Jacobean Age
1625-1649 Caroline Age
1649-1660 Commonwealth Period (or Puritan Interregnum)
• 1660-1785 The Neoclassical Period
1660-1700 The Restoration
1700-1745 The Augustan Age (or Age of Pope)
1745-1785 The Age of Sensibility (or Age of Johnson)
• 1785-1832 The Romantic Period
• 1832-1901 The Victorian Period
1848-1860 The Pre-Raphaelites
1880-1901 Aestheticism and Decadence
• 1901 to the present The Twentieth century
1901-1914 The Edwardian Period
1910-1936 The Georgian Period
1914- The Modern Period
• 1945- Postmodernism
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• The Old English Period, or the Anglo-Saxon
Period:
• from the invasion of Celtic England by Germanic
tribes (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes) in the first
half of the 5th century to the conquest of
England in 1066 by the Norman French
• Beowulf, the oldest epic poem
• lyric laments (“The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”
and “Deor”)
• Caedmon and Cynewulf: the authors of religious
poetry
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• Middle English Period:
• from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to about
1500
• the Anglo-Norman Period: from 1100 to 1350
• the second half of the 14th century (the first
great age of primarily secular literature in the
native vernacular known as Middle English):
Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William
Langland and the anonymous Gawain poet
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• The Renaissance (“rebirth”): the period of European history following
the Middle Ages
• Elizabethan Age: the period of the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603)
• A great (in drama the greatest) age of English literature – the age of Sir
Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, William
Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Ben Johnson
• Jacobean Age: the period of the reign of James I (1603-25)
• Prose writings: Bacon, John Donne, Robert Burton and the translation
of the Bible
• Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies and tragicomedies
• The poets and playwrights: John Donne, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton,
Lady Mary Wroth, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John
Webster, George Chapman and Thomas Middleton
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• Caroline Age: the period of the reign of Charles I (1625-49)
• The Civil War; John Milton, the metaphysical poets (George
Herbert), the Cavalier poets (Richard Lovelace, Sir John
Suckling and Thomas Carew), the prose writers (Robert
Burton, Sir Thomas Browne …)
• The Commonwealth Period, or the Puritan Interregnum:
from the end of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I
in 1649 to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under
Charles II in 1660
• The Puritans closed the public theatres (1642)
• The prose writers: Thomas Hobbes, Sir Thomas Browne,
Thomas Fuller and Izaak Walton
• The poets: Henry Vaughan, Edmund Waller, Abraham
Cowley and Andrew Marvell
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• The Neoclassical Period: from the Restoration (1660)
to the Romantic Period (1785)
• Restoration: the Stuart line (Charles II), 1660
• The theatres came back to vigorous life, the comedy of
manners and heroic tragedy
• The major poet and critic, John Dryden. The other
poets: Samuel Butler and the Earl of Rochester
• The prose writers: Samuel Pepys, John Bunyan, John
Locke, Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her
living by her pen
• Augustan Age: from approximately 1700 to 1745
• The leading writers of the time: Alexander Pope,
Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison
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• Age of Sensibility: from the death of Alexander
Pope in 1744 to 1785 (or 1789 or 1798)
• Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund
Burke, James Boswell and Edward Gibbon
• the emergence of new cultural attitudes and
types of poetry which expressed anti-neoclassic
sensibility
• The poets: Thomas Gray, William Collins, Joseph
and Thomas Warton, Christopher Smart, Thomas
Percy and James Macpherson
• The great novelists: Samuel Richardson, Henry
Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne
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• Romantic Period: from 1785 or 1789 (the outbreak of the
French Revolution) or 1798 (the publication of William
Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads)
to 1830 or 1832
• The major poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Burns,
William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats
• The prose writers: Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas
De Quincey, Mary Wollstonecraft and Leigh Hunt
• The novelists: Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and Mary
Shelley
• the Gothic romances by William Beckford, Matthew
Gregory Lewis, William Godwin and Ann Radcliffe
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• Victorian Period: from 1830 or 1832 (the passage of the first
Reform Bill) to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901
• The notable poets: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold and
Gerard Manley Hopkins
• The prominent essayists: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Arnold and
Walter Pater
• The most distinguished novelists: Charlotte and Emily Brontë,
Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell,
George Eliot, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy
and Samuel Butler
• prominent literary movements: Pre-Raphaelites, Aestheticism and
Decadence
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• The Pre-Raphaelites. “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” (1848): a return to
the truthfulness, simplicity and spirit of devotion, attributed to the
painting of the high Italian Renaissance
• The poets: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina Rossetti, William
Morris and Algernon Swinburne
• Aestheticism and Decadence.
• Aestheticism:
• the latter part of the 19th century
• the phrase “l’art pour l’art” – art for art’s sake
• introduced by Walter Pater, expressed by Algernon Charles Swinburne and
by the writers of the 1890s (Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Lionel
Johnson)
• the Decadent movement:
• art is totally opposed to “nature”, in the sense both of biological nature
and of the standard, or “natural”, norms of morality and sexual behaviour
• manifested in the 1860s (Algernon Charles Swinburne), and in the 1890s
(Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson)
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• Edwardian Period: from the death of Victoria (1901) to the
beginning of the World War I (1914); the reign of Edward VII (1901
to 1910)
• The poets: Thomas Hardy, Alfred Noyes, William Butler Yeats and
Rudyard Kipling
• The dramatists: Henry Arthur Jones, John Galsworthy, George
Bernard Shaw
• The playwrights of the Celtic Revival: Lady Gregory, Yeats and John
M. Synge
• The prose writers: Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford,
John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Henry James
• Georgian Period: a term applied both to the reigns of the four
successive Georges (1714-1830) and more frequently to the reign of
George V (1910-36)
• The Georgian poets: Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Ralph
Hodgson, W. H. Davies and John Masefield
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• Modern Period: the literature written since the
beginning of World War I in 1914
• experiments in subject matter, form and style
• The poets: W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, W. H.
Auden, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas and Seamus
Heaney
• The novelists: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H.
Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, E. M.
Forster, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing
and Nadine Gordimer
• The dramatists: G. B. Shaw, Sean O’Casey, Noel
Coward, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill,
Brendan Behan, Frank McGuinness and Tom Stoppard
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• The Postmodern Period: the era after World War
II (1939-45)
• Postmodernism:
• a continuation of the counter traditional
experiments of modernism; attempts to break
away from modernist forms and to overthrow the
elitism of modernist “high art”
• many of the works blend literary genres, cultural
and stylistic levels, and resist classification
according to traditional literary rubrics
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