A Comprehensive Guide to English Literature: Periods, Authors, and Key Works

Posted on Aug 1, 2024 in Arts and Humanities

Periods of English Literature

Old English or Anglo-Saxon (450-1066)

  • Beowulf, Wonderr

Middle English (1066-1500)

  • The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)

The Renaissance (1500-1660)

  • Shakespeare: Macbeth, Hamlet
  • John Donne: The Flea
  • Chudleigh (neoclassical): To the Ladies

The Neoclassical Period (1660-1798)

  • Defoe: The Education of Women
  • Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
  • Richardson: Pamela

The Romantic Period (1798-1832)

  • Shelley: Frankenstein
  • Percy. B Shelley: Ozymandias
  • Jane Austen: Sense & Sensibility

The Victorian Period (1832-1901)

  • Dickens: Bleak House, Hard Times
  • Thomas Hardy: The Oxen

The Edwardian Period (1901-1910)

The Georgian Period (1910-1936)

  • Virginia Woolf: Professions of Women, The Legacy

The Modern Period

The Canterbury Tales

  • Language: Middle English
  • Context: Idealism vs. realism
  • Stories: A compilation in prose interspersed with verse
  • Argument: Pilgrims going from London to the sanctuary of Canterbury and telling stories along the way
  • Features: Irony & humor

Anglo-Saxon Literature

  • Aristocratic audience

The General Prologue

  • Chaucer introduces the characters that will appear later.
  • These characters belong to different estates: the noble estate (to which belong the knight), the religious estate, and the estate of non-privileged.
  • The Wife of Bath belongs to this last estate.

The Portrait of the Wife of Bath in the General Prologue

  1. Women dedicated to wandering the world -> great sexual freedom
  2. She has married several times -> independent woman
  3. Strong, good wife
  4. Contradiction: Religious -> she enjoys her body & wears pretty clothes
  5. Appears at important religious sites such as Rome, Boulogne, and Saint-James of Compostela
  6. Attitude of the narrator: Admire but distance

Shakespeare (The Renaissance)

  • Historical context: Strengthening royal power against the feudal & Aquire boom the humanist spirit and the Renaissance aesthetic
  • The author: He used the conventions of the Elizabethan sonnet but with a personal feeling / He mixed elements of lyric poetry and the dramatic, He expressed dramatic emotions like: jealousy, passion, and despair. These emotions produce the cathartic effect of tragedy./ he gave a new twist to the Elisab. resources:
  1. The love theme challenges the platonic ideal
  2. He offers a personal view of time as a destructive element
  3. He treats the subject of reality and appearance
  4. Many of symbol metaphors and images came from fields such as gardening, navigation, or astrology.

John Donne (Renaissance)

  • Context: Period of skepticism (dogmas are questioned)
  • He belongs to the metaphysical poets: they use such paradoxes, strange metaphors, and transcendent arguments/ In Spain, it will be “Barrocs”
  • An exciting time on discoveries

Metaphysical Poets

  1. Poetry in the 17th century was personal, private
  2. Religious and lay poetry intermingle
  3. The wit challenges the reader
  4. Employ colloquial speech and based rhythms innovative verse forms
  5. They explore the relationship between lovers or private feelings about God
  6. Awareness of physical death

The Author

  1. Reason+feeling-> the thinking becomes lived experience and thought-provoking feelings
  2. Love isn’t idealized feeling. It is a natural passion involved in both body and spirit.
  3. Goes to third person to develop reasoning
  4. White renaissance, he broke with the medieval idealism and he recovered the body
  5. Modern character->distance between work and reader ≠  Shakespeare and conception of love
  6. Intellectual and emotional poetry but isn’t sentimental

Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God

  • Structure: 3 quatrains+coda
  • Tone: Between begging & commanding /He’s in pain and he claims to God / It’s difficult to believe in God-> religious crisis /Finally, he asks the God about freedom=paradox /Mix the passions with the reason/ Idea of punishment: religion/ three persons of God: God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit/ The soul and the mind go together

Chudleigh-> To the Ladies

The author: addresses issues of feminism/ her poetry is about human relationship/ her references to marriage as a trap that was psycologically stifling for women suggest.

· To the ladies: line 1 to 20: good woman -> she explains what many women do / line 20 to 24: independent womn-> she gives her advice/ receiver: the women/ it is a critical-> she presents man as innately violent and estructive to women/ tone: angry/ repetition of the world “nothing” 5 times.

Daniel Defoe-> the education of women (neoclassical period)

topics: political, philosophical and literary/ they present values of civilized world/ the literature should: instruct and delight/ Robinson Crusoe was the first novel taht is the genere of burguesie

Features of novel: contemporaneity/ simple and direct lenguage/ presented life at it was/ the charctrs weren’t stereotypes/ Plausible stories/ Rise of individual due to the empiricist philosophy/ realistic, subjective and individualistic

Developement of English novel: defoe-> adventures/ Richardson-> psycological novel/ fielding-> realist novel/ Sterne-> experimental novel

The education of women: satire/ he tried to persuade with his arguments/ he showed his particular points of view/ he wants to have equal rights with men/ he’s always superior position, women in their youth (stitch, sew, make baubles) /retorical questions/he use pronouns to make text more personal/ If God wants to be women educated is because it’s moral and correct/ tone: protection of woman/ woman have to be educate fot the man, not her own sake or benefit/ not very objective: hyperbolic


Fielding-> Tom jones

The author: criticized the greatest sin for him (hypocresy, vanity, corruption)/ short scenes and dialogue( He suses Biblical references to give moral authority

Tom jones: he presents the first anti-hero with imulsive and temperamental character, but h is sincere/ he portrays a world of outdoor/ wide range of characters in motion

Richarson -> Pamela

author: he started some novel traditions: marriage plot or doble standard about sex/ detailed descriptions ans slow rhythm/ puritan moral and serious character

Pamela: sentimental novel/ she had a strong character and she wa a catholic girl/ is the model of virtue to imitate. Finally Pamela marries his master/ She is cunning and hypocresy model too because his goal was to marry Mister B and to achieve, shes uses her virtu./ She uses “the art of women” to upward, Pamela is independent and she is subject to the will of her husband, who must always be grateful.

Shelley->  Frankenstein & ozymandias (romantic period)

· English society, industrial rev.-> division of class (work society-entrepreneurs)/ romantincism: spirit of freedom/ important concepts: imagination, poetry, nature and irrationality/ th late 18th rationalism weren’t satisfied and emotions becoming more important

Frankenstein: Recovery of irrational/ gothic novel and horror history/ frankenstein: green, childish(vulnerable & innocent)/ extract1: here the monster is brought to life/ extract2: thaht night, the monster dreams and he comes across Elizabeth, his adopted sister / finally the monster kills elizabeth & william

Ozymandias; structure: ABAB ACDC EDE FEF/ sculplture of a king, 3 points of view/ ironic/ relatienship between art and nature/ emotions/ political sonnet/dicotomy life and death(the meaning)/


Jane Austen-> sense and sensibility

· Belongs to the romantic period but there are elements that belongs to 18th century /Romantic elements (contradictions and tensions in the society of her time)/ her social portrait represents upper middle tensions/ she uses irony to dennounce/ small group of chracters/ Marianne: innocent shy and fancy/ he’s not really objective/ she thinks that she’s perfect but later she is dissapointed/ the narrator admire her but h ridicules her throught th irony in order to the reader to look for balance/ this nvel is based in the clutter of everyday lfe

Dickens (victorian period)

· context: proletarian class live in poor condition/ idealism of everyday life both the middle calss and lower class/ 3 stages: 1st: change and crisis 2nd: stability and britishprime 3rd: dissapointment and scepticism

· the author: he describes the city as part of contrasts between employer and the worker

·Hard times: He describesa type of city between infernal and fantastic/ attack on unions/ he critizes the utilitarian philosophy that was the bases of ndustrial society.

·Break House: He critizes the English legal system and the fact conerned with foreigh missions that conditions in the working population living/ General features: mix realism and idealism, recreation of everyday life making it more intresting, raw vision of reality/ he was the melodram and the myths of fairy tales


Thomas Hardy-> the oxen

·the author: transition between realist novel and modernism model/ viiew of reality:pesimism/ called into question the victorian moral/ mix the rural origins with the university education/ he had suffered a loss of faith process=fatalism

·The oxen: it still has romatic reminiscences/ elements of modernism(vision of reality)/ simple poem in its form but deep and complex in its content/ He uses the direct speech to reproduce the words of elder because this means thaht authorial voice remembers the extract word after few years/ tone first two stances: melancolicç

Virginia woolf .> professions of women(the georgian period)

· in as essay where woolf discussed two impediments in her work as professional woman writer. The firts was the torment she endured at the hands of the “Angel in the House”, a ersonal hantom named after the heroine of a famous poem. This phantom attempted to convince her thaht women should not deal freely and openly with questions of human relations, morality or sex. Rather, they must charm, they must conciliate, they must tell lies if they are to succeed. Whenever Woolf began to write, the phantom appeared./ she speaks in 3rd person

· the legacy: concepts (person, individual,subject I, the expression to be subjectet to something/ the stor is told in 3rd person/ the symbolic meaning of the mirrors: womanhad served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing magic power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size./ references with marxism/  protagonist: angela that she’s conflict with herself and she can’t be enought courage to divorce Gilbert, she commints suicide.