The Important Periods in the

History of English Literature

• I. The Classical Period (1200 BCE - 455 CE)
• II. The Medieval Period (455 CE-1485 CE)
• III. The Renaissance and Reformation (1485-1660 CE)
• IV. The Enlightenment (Neoclassical) Period (1660-1790 CE)
• V. The Romantic Period (1790-1830 CE)
• VI. The Victorian Period and the 19th Century (1832-1901 CE)
• VII. The Modern Period (1914-1945 CE)
• VIII. The Postmodern Period (1945 - onward)
 I. The Classical Period (1200 BCE - 455 CE)

• The earliest of the phases of English literature

started with Anglo-Saxon literature of the
Angles and Saxons (the ancestors of the
English race).
• they sang at their feasts, and the songs were
about battles, gods, religion, agriculture and
their ancestral heroes.
 II. The Medieval Period (455 CE-1485 CE)

• The Normans defeated the Anglo-Saxon King, Harold 11, at the Battle of
Hastings and conquered England. This conquest inaugurated a distinctly new
epoch in literature, as well as the political history of England.
• awakening of national life.
• The people started getting inspired by this new vision of a greater future.
• The Normans not only brought with them soldiers, artisans and traders, they
also had scholars to revive knowledge, minstrels to celebrate victories, or
sing of adventure and love.
• Old English poetry vanished and romances, that talked of heroes of by-gone
days became popular. They dealt with the stories of King Arthur, The War of
Troy and the mythical doings of Charlemagne and of Alexander the Great. 
• The major poets of this age are William Langland, John Gower and Chaucer.
 III. The Renaissance and Reformation (1485-1660 CE)
Elizabethan Age

• the ‘revival of learning’, and it denotes in its broadest sense the gradual
enlightenment of human mind after the darkness of the Middle Ages.
• that man discovered and unveiled his new potentials.
• Along with the revival of learning, new discoveries took place in several other fields.
• The Golden Age
• The most noteworthy achievement during this period was in the field of
drama.
• that they brought the educated class in touch with a more advanced form of
drama as compared to the old English play.
• Poetry in the Renaissance took a new trend. It was the poetry of the new age
of discovery, enthusiasm and excitement. 
• The prominent authors in this age were University Wits - Shakespeare (thirty-
seven plays and 154 sonnets), Ben Johnson, Spencer and Christopher
Marlowe.
 V. The Romantic Period (1790-1830 CE)

• It is a movement which started against the neoclassical school of thought, and

was marked by the publication of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ by Wordsworth and
Coleridge in 1798.
• In Romanticism, primary importance was given to the artist’s feelings and
freedom of expression.
• The essence lay in the fact that literature must reflect all that is spontaneous
and unaffected in nature and man, and it must be free to follow its own fancy,
in its own way.
• No age in English Literature has produced poets as those belonging to this age.
• it was the age of revolutionary change, not only in view of the character and
function of poetry, but in the whole conception of the nature of man and of
the world in which he found himself. 
• The escapist, Keats, the visionary, Coleridge, and many other poetic giants like
Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Southey, all belonged to this age.
 VI. The Victorian Period and the 19th Century (1832-1901 CE)

• this age is divided into two parts: The early

Victorian age and the late Victorian age.
• from agriculture to industrialization, and power
was being transferred to the middle class.
• Child labour was being condemned and steps
were taken to diminish it.
• This issue was highlighted in the novels of Charles
Dickens, who belonged to the Victorian era.
• The writers and poets considered it their duty to bring people back
to religion, and so their work was more moralistic in nature. 
• Robert Browning, Mathew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson 
• Victorian literature is often considered as stuffy and morally
oppressive. 
• it is also very imaginative and emotional.  It also reflects realism to
show the plight of everyday working class.
• Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, and Charles Dickens. During
this time, novel writing became the most prominent literary
work.
 VII. The Modern Period (1914-1945 CE)

• The Modern Age in English Literature started from the

beginning of the twentieth century
• Nothing was considered certain and people strove for
realism and meaning of life.
• They did not take anything for granted; everything was
questioned.
• the job of the poet was not only to create “beauty”. They
wrote both about beautiful and twisted things, about human
feelings, about the sad realities, about World Wars, about
pessimism and humanitarianism.
• Dramatists portray actual English life in their plays. 
• Some of the novels adopted the technique of stream
of consciousness.
• All the past traditions and norms were broken, and the
writers started to focus more on the characters’ inner
mind and psychology, rather than the actions and plot.
• Science made a massive progress, and Darwinism and
other such theories (which challenged religious
beliefs), greatly welcomed doubts and skepticism.
•  W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H.
Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Wilfred Owen.
 VIII. The Postmodern Period (1945 - onward)

• Post-modern literature serves as a reaction to

the supposed stylistic and ideological
limitations of modernist literature and the
radical changes the world underwent after the
end of World War II
• the various disasters that occurred in the last
half of the 20th century left a number of
writers with a profound sense of paranoia.
• Post-modern philosophy tends to conceptualize the world in
which knowledge and facts are always related to particular
situations, and that it’s both futile and impossible to attempt
to locate any precise meaning to any idea, concept or event. 
• at the core of many post-modern literary writers’ imagination,
there is a belief that the world has already fallen apart and
that actual, singular meaning is impossible to locate.
• It also implies that literature should serve to reveal the
world’s absurdities, paradoxes and ironies.
• Post-modern literary writers come from all across the world. It
is not specific to writers from any particular region or culture.
•  T.S.Eliot, Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard, Fowles, Calvino, 
Ginsberg,