English Literature: A Historical Timeline

Posted on Feb 4, 2025 in Modern Philology. English

1. Old English – 5th Century: The Migration of the Peoples

Heroic, Religious, Elegiac

  • Beowulf (unknown author) – Beowulf kills the monster Grendel and his mother, then a dragon, and dies (themes of loyalty and honor).
  • Cynewulf – “The Dream of the Rood” (1st English poet)

2. Middle English – 1066: The Norman Conquest (William the Conqueror)

  • Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400)
  • The Pardoner’s Tale – Three men find florins under a tree, kill one another, and all die in the name of money.

3. The Renaissance – 1485: The End of the War of the Roses

Humanism

  • Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn, John Colet
  • Thomas More – Utopia (1516)
  • Thomas Elyot

Reformation

  • 1517 – Luther’s theses in Wittenberg
  • 1532 – John Calvin
  • 1534 – Act of Supremacy (Henry VIII)
  • Christopher Marlowe – wrote about love
  • Sir Walter Raleigh – responded that love is fleeting
  • Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolution of the Spheres (1543)
  • Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Amerigo Vespucci
  • William Shakespeare (1564-1616) – Sonnets (154 sonnets, including 130 about an ungly love)
  • John Milton (1608-1674) – blind, XIX Sonnet, Comus, Lycidas, Paradise Lost

16th Century: The Tudor Epoch

  • John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw (metaphysical poets) – critical approach

The Cavalier Poets

  • Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson

4. The Restoration of Monarchy – 1660: Charles II / Neoclassicism

Secular in spirit, skeptical, rationalistic, satire

  • Empiricism – John Locke (1632-1704)
  • John Dryden (1631-1700)
  • Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
  • Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe (1719)
  • Samuel Richardson – Pamela (1740)
  • Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) – critic, biographer, editor of Shakespeare’s plays
  • Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (1818) – Gothic novel

4.5 Preromanticism – Poets of Sensibility (Graveyard Poets)

  • Thomas Gray – Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
  • William Blake – The Tyger, The Lamb

The French Revolution – 1789

5. Romanticism – 1798: The Lyrical Ballads by W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge

1st Generation

  • William Wordsworth – Lucy Gray
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2nd Generation

  • John Keats – Ode on a Grecian Urn
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • George Gordon, Lord Byron
  • Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice, Emma

6. Victorianism – 1832: The First Reform Bill

Hypocrisy, money vs. love, social climbing, morality vs. riches

  • 1837 – Queen Victoria ascends to the throne
  • 1901 – Queen Victoria dies
  • Jeremy Bentham – utilitarianism (1748-1832)
  • John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
  • John Ruskin (1819-1900) – morality and art (didacticism)
  • Poetry influenced by Shelley and Keats
  • Charles Dickens (1812-1870) – journalism, melodrama, The Mistaken Milliner
  • Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species (1859)

7. Modernism – Turn of the 20th Century until the 1920s

  • James Joyce – The Boarding House (Mrs. Mooney, separated from her alcoholic husband; Polly; Mr. Doran; an unwanted marriage)
  • Virginia Woolf – Kew Gardens, A Family Supper
  • Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Imagism – The art object must be dry, hard, and clearly defined.
  • Ezra Pound – chief of the Imagist movement (1885-1972)
  • 1905 – Albert Einstein, The Theory of Relativity
  • George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde – two theatrical approaches