A Journey Through British Literature: Anglo-Saxon to 20th Century
Anglo-Saxon Times
Beowulf
The Middle Ages (1066-1500)
Poetry
Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)
The Elizabethan Age (1558-1603)
William Shakespeare
The 17th Century
Poetry
John Milton (Paradise Lost)
The 18th Century
The Age of Reason
Prose
Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels)
Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
Samuel Richardson (Pamela)
Henry Fielding (Tom Jones)
Horace Walpole (Castle of Otranto)
The Romantic Movement (1789-1832)
Jane Austen
Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe)
Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)
Poetry
William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience)
William Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
The Victorian Age (1832-1900)
Charles Dickens
The Brontë Sisters
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
Anne Brontë (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes stories)
H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds)
Drama
Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest)
Poetry
Alfred Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam A.H.H.)
The 20th Century (1900-1939)
Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)
Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes)
D.H. Lawrence
Expressionism
Sons and Lovers
The Rainbow
Women in Love
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
E.M. Forster
Howards End
Maurice
A Room with a View
A Passage to India
Virginia Woolf
Impressionism
Jacob’s Room
Stream of Consciousness
To the Lighthouse
Mrs. Dalloway
Orlando
The Waves
James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Dubliners
Ulysses
Finnegans Wake
Theatre
George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion)
Poetry
W.B. Yeats (Easter, 1916)
T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land, Murder in the Cathedral)
The 20th Century (1939-2000)
Novel
Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory, A Burnt-Out Case)
George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
The Novel in the 1950s and 1960s
William Golding (Lord of the Flies)
Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim)
Doris Lessing (Children of Violence, The Golden Notebook)
Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)
Agatha Christie
The Novel from 1970
Magic Realism
Martin Amis
Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac)
Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)
Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)
Drama (1950s)
Absurd Drama and Social Drama
Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)
John Osborne (Look Back in Anger)
Alan Bennett (The History Boys, The Uncommon Reader)
Expressionism
Artistic tendency characterized by an emotional and subjective approach to the world.
Impressionism
Tendency to show the outside world through its impressions on the artist, who is more interested in mental life.
Stream of Consciousness
Time is a continuous flow from the already to the not yet, where past, present, and future, thoughts, feelings, and conscious apprehensions join in a single moment.
Magic Realism
A style of literature in which fantastic or imaginary, and often unsettling, images or events are depicted in a sharply detailed, realistic manner.
The Tories (17th-19th Centuries)
17th-18th Centuries: Supported the Anglican Church, the aristocracy, and the monarchy.
18th-19th Centuries: Supported the country gentry’s interests along with the merchant classes and official administering groups.