The Important Periods In The History of English Literature. Nonsense Bioscope.

 

THE IMPORTANT PERIODS IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

 

1. The The old English [450AD -1066AD]
2. Middle English [1066AD-1500AD]
3. The Renaissance period [1500-1600]
4. The Elizabethan period [1500-1603]
5. The Jacobean period [1603-1625]
6. The Caroline period [1625-1649]
7. The Puritan period [1649-1660]
8. The Restoration period [1660-1700]
9. The Augustan period [1700-1785]
10. The Romantic period [1785-1830]
11. The Victorian period [1830-1901]
12. The Modern period [1890-1918]
13. The Inter- war period [1918-1939]
14. The Mid 20^th century [1939 onwards]

 

THE OLD ENGLISH PERIOD [450AD-1066]

 

Overview

The Angles and Saxons conquered what is now called England in the 5th and 6^th centuries. In the 7th century, Christian missionaries taught the English to write. The English wrote down law-codes and later their poems. Northumbria soon produced Cædmon and Bede. Heroic poetry, of a Christian kind, is the chief legacy of Old English literature, notably Beowulf and the Elegies. A considerable prose literature grew up after Alfred (d. 899). There were four centuries of writing in English before the Norman Conquest.

 

Places of interest in Old and Middle English Literature

Social Background:

Celts (Britons) ------------ Britain

The making of England; the invasion of Roman Empire in the 4th AD…

According to British traditions the English from the  continent came first as mercenaries to help in the  defense against the Picts and Scots, at first the people were warriors from invading outlying areas:

 Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes

- later they were agricultural

* Alfred the Great was most prominent King

Texts feature:

- strong belief in fate

- admiration of heroic warriors who prevail in battle

- express religious faith and moral instruction through literature

Styles include:

- oral tradition of literature

- poetry dominant genre

- unique verse form

 

Five Great Principles Of Life:

1. Love for personal freedom
2. Responsiveness to nature
3. Love for Reliogion
4. Love for Woomanwood
5. Struggle for Glory

 

Effect of Literature:

- Christianity helps literacy to spread

- introduces Roman alphabet to Britain

- oral tradition helps unite diverse peoples and their myths

Important works:

v  Beowulf (3182 Lines)

•       Beowulf, the earliest literature, the national epic of the Anglo-Saxon,one of the striking features- The poem can be considered as the pagan origin

•       Work is anonymous

•       Widsith(Autobiography of scop)

v  Anglo- Saxon Chronicle

•       Inspired by king Alfred

•       Description of the horrors of Stephen's reign

•       Description of William the conqueror

Other Works:

 The Vercelli Book, Junius Manuscript, Exeter Book, Beowulf(4Scripts)

Authors

v  Caedmon (poet)

•       The Genesis ,Exodus ,Daniel

•       Three shorter poems often considered as one under the title ‘Christ and Satan’

v  Cynewulf(poet)

•       Four poems contain the signature of Cynewulf in runic characters :Juliana , Elene ,Christ , Wife’s Lament, Husband’s Message

•       Bede & Afred the Great ( Historian & Prose writer)

 

Ø  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English, from the 9th century, that chronicle is the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The poem Battle of Maldon also deals with history. This is a work of uncertain date, celebrating the Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Viking invasion.

 

Ø   Oral tradition was very strong in early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were very popular, and some, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English, and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia. The only surviving manuscript is the Nowell Codex, the precise date of which is debated, but most estimates place it close to the year 1000. Beowulf is the conventional title, and its composition is dated between the 8th and the early 11th century.

 

 

THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD[1066AD-1500]

 

Overview

Literature in England in this period was not just in English and Latin but in French as well, and developed in directions set largely in France. Epic and elegy gave way to Romance and lyric. English writing revived fully in English after 1360, and flowered in the reign of Richard II (1372-99). It gained a literary standard in London English after 1425, and developed modern forms of verse, of prose and of drama.

 

•       Establishment of Norman and Angevin dynasties

•       Internal struggle between king, clergy , noble and people

Crusades bring the development of a money economy for the first time in Britain

- trading increases dramatically as a result of the Crusades

- William the Conqueror crowned king in 1066

- Henry III crowned king in 1154 brings a judicial system, royal courts, juries, and chivalry to Britain .

Features of the Age

•       An Era of transition

•       Period of transition and of experiment

•       The anonymous nature

Works are entirely without known authors

•       The domination of poetry

.Black death, Famine and social unrest

.The corruption of church and Reformation

Important Works:

The vision of William concerning piers the plowman- William Langland  Brut- Lazamon

Texts feature:

- plays that instruct the illiterate masses in morals and religion

- chivalric code of honor/romances

- religious devotion

Styles include:

- oral tradition continues

- folk ballads

- mystery and miracle plays

- morality plays

-        frame stories

-        moral tales

-        Interludes

 

THE CHAUCEREAN PERIOD (1340-1400)

 

•       The period includes the greater part of the rein of Edward III and the long  French wars associated with his name

•       The accession of his grandson Richard II

•       The revolution of 1399, the disposition of Richard, and the foundation of the Lancastrian dynasty.

•       The age of unrest and transition

The literary movement of the age clearly reflected by five famous poets

v  Langland:- voicing the social discontent, preaching the equality of men and  the dignity of labor.

v  Wycliffe:- giving the gospel to the people in their own tongue

v  Gower:- criticizing the vigorous life and plainly afraid of its consequences

v  Mandeville:- romancing about the wonders to be seen abroad

v  Chaucer:- sharing in all the stirring life of the times

•       The first humanist

•       The first novelist in verse

•       The father of modern English language

Works:

• The Canterbury tales
• The book of the duchess
• The house of fame
• Anelida and Arcite
• The parliament of fowls
• Troilus and Criseyde
• The legend of good women

Shorter poems

• An ABC
• The complaint of mass
• The complaint to his lady
• The complaint of Venus
• Fortune
• truth

 

Ø  Middle English Bible translations, notably Wycliffe's Bible, helped to establish English as a literary language. Wycliffe's Bible is the name now given to a group of Bible translations into Middle English that were made under the direction of, or at the instigation of, John Wycliffe. They appeared between about 1382 and 1395. These Bible translations were the chief inspiration and cause of the Lollard movement, a pre-Reformation movement that rejected many of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

 

 

 

THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD [1500-1603]

 

Overview

The hopes of the humanists and the writers of the early Renaissance were c short by the turmoil of the Reformation and the despotism of Henry VIII. A literary Renaissance was triumphantly relaunched in the late 1570s by Sidney and Spenser, and the 1590s produced - besides the drama - an unprecedented abundance of non-dramatic poets and translators. This Elizabethan golden age also saw a variety of prose, artful, lively and dignified.

• Also called Renaissance Period
• The golden age of            English history
• The Elizabethan era is perhaps more famous for  its theatre and the works of William Shakespeare
• Elizabethan Renaissance theatre begins with the  opening of the “the red lion” theatre in 1567
• Other famous theatres:-curtain theatre[1577]
• Globe theatre[1599]

• Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer of  the English language
• Important genres of theatre are history plays , the  tragedy and the comedy

Characteristics:

• - world view shifts from religion and after life to one stressing the
•   human life on earth
• - popular theme: development of human potential
• - popular theme: many aspects of love explored
• - constant, timeless& courtly love
• - Reforms in Institution
• - Dominance of Reason & Development of Science
• - love subject to change

Styles include:

• - poetry
• - the sonnet
• - metaphysical poetry
• - elaborate and unexpected metaphors called conceits
• - drama
• - written in verse
• - supported by royalty
• - tragedies, comedies, histories

Author and works

v  Edmund Spencer[1552-1599]

•       Poets poet and prince of poet- called by Charles lamb and Milton

•       Poets poet and critic’s critic - T.S Eliot

Works (88 Sonnets)

• The Faerie queen
• Shepherds calendar
• Prothalamion
• Epithalamion

Sir Philip Sydney [1554-1586]

• Father of English criticism
• He took a brilliant in the military-literary-courtly life.

Works

Astrophel and stella  Arcadia

Apology for poetry

Totell’s Miscellany (Known as first printed book of Poetry In English Literature) Collection of poetry of different poets.

Ø  Francis Bacon 1561-1526

Father of English essays

Bacon’s fame rests very largely on his essays

-the aphoristic style and epigrammatic brevity in his

essay

-the compact and condensed thought in his essay, are very important

Works

•       The history of Henry VII

•       The new Atlantis

•       The advancement of learning

 

Ø  Christopher Marlowe(Father Of English Drama)

•       Dramatist and poet

•       Works

•       Doctor Faustus,

•       The Jew Of Malta

Ø  William Shakespeare

•       The greatest poet and dramatist in English literature

•       Playwright, actor and shareholder in an acting company

•       He wrote 37 plays, 154 sonnets,2 long narrative poem and 3 poems

Works

•       Poems:- The rape of Lucrene 1594

-Venus and Adonis 1593

-The Passionate Pilgrim 1599

•       Tragedies :–Hamlet

-Othello

-King Lear

-Macbeth

•       Comedies –The Midsummer Night’s Dream

-The Merchant of Venice

-As You Like it

-Twelfth Night

•       Tragic comedies –Cymbeline

-The Winter’s Tale

-The Tempest

•       Last play :- The Tempest (an autobiographical play)

University wits

•       Group of young dramatists associated with  oxford and Cambridge

•       They introduced Romantic drama into  English theatre

The university wits are:-

v  George peele1558-1598

v  Robert greene1558-1592

v  Thomas nash1567-1601

v  Thomas lodge1558-1625

v  Thomas kyd1558-1594

v  John Lyly

v  Christopher marlowe1564-1593

 

Ø  After William Caxton introduced the printing press in England in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer (1549), a lasting influence on literary language. The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th to the 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. Like most of northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later. Renaissance style and ideas were slow in penetrating England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance.

 

[JACOBEAN PERIOD [1603-1625] and [CAROLINE PERIOD 1625-1649]

 

•       James ascended the throne in 1603

•       Court standards were lowered

•       Development of            English prose

•       Decline of the drama after the death of  Shakespeare

Important events from Jacobean to restoration period

•       Caroline age

•       Metaphysical age

•       Puritan revolution

•       Puritan age

•       Period of commonwealth

Authors and works

   (The cavalier poets)

v  Robert Herrick:- Hesperides , noble numbers

v  Edmund Waller:-go lovely Rose

v  Richard Lovelace:- Lucasta , To Alter from Prison

(Metaphysical poets)

v  John Donne:-Father Of Metaphysics

v  Andrew Marvell:-the Rehearsal Transposed

v  Henry Vaughan:- Silex Saintillans

v  Abraham Cowley:- The Mistress

 

PURITAN PERIOD[1649-1660]

 

• Clash between Catholics and Protestants
• Extreme fundamentalism
• Rebellion began during the age of Charles I
• Civil war between Charles I and Puritans for 7 years
• 1649-1660-Rule of commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell
• Charles I ascended the throne after the death of Cromwell ; beginning  of Restoration period

Important authors and works

v  John Milton

•       The first literary epic poet

•       Poetry , mathematics and music were his main studies

Works

•       Paradise Lost

•       Paradise regained

•       Comus

•       On Blindness

•       lycidas

 

Ø  The most important prose work of the early 17th century was the King James Bible. This, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. This represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale, and it became the standard Bible of the Church of England.

 

RESTORATION PERIOD[1660-1700]

 

• Known as Age of Dryden
• Death of Cromwell in 1660
• Accession marked the beginning of the Restoration Age
• Influence of French            culture
• Theatres came back to life
• Witty intellectual satirizing            manners and fashions of a  particular         time in society

Important works and Authors

• John Dryden:-  Political Satire, Doctrinal Poems& The Fables

The Rival Ladies Tyrannick Love, All for Love, Alexander’s  Feast Hind& Panther

•       William Congreve:-The Old Bachelor , The Double Dealer ,  The Mourning Bride

•       George Etherege:-The Comical Revenge , She Would If She  Could …Comedy Of Manners

Characteristics:
1. Form of realism
2. Preciseness
Restoration Drama:
   Comedy Of Manners
It is an entertainment form which satirizes the manners and affections of social class or of multiple classes.
Dryden was the first to write Comedy of Manners with his Wild Gallant, which was a failure.
Works:
1. The Comical Revenge
2. The way Of  the World
3. Love for Love
4. The Country Wife & The Plain Dealer

 

AUGUSTAN AGE[1700-1785] Or, THE AGE OF POPE ( 1700-1744) Or, THE AGE OF JOHNSON (1744-1785)

 

Overview

After the brilliant achievements of Pope, literary civilization broadened to include more of the middle class and of women. The aristocratic patron gave way to the bookseller. After mid-century, the Augustan ‘sense’ of Swift, Pope and Johnson was increasingly supplemented by Sensibility, with ‘Ossian’, Gray and Walpole. The novel flourished in the 1740s, with Richardson, Fielding and Sterne. The latter part of the century saw major achievements in non-fictional prose, with Johnson, Gibbon and Boswell, a brief revival of drama (Goldsmith, Sheridan), and a retreat of poetry into privacy and eccentricity.

 

The eighteenth century

The main features

• Strong traditionalism
• Conceived literature primarily as an art
• To them poetry was an imitation of human life
• Rise and fall of satires
• New developments in science shattered man’s ego
• Rise of novels

Important writers and works

v  Alexander Pope:-An Essay on Criticism , The Rape of the Lock, Windsor  Forest

v  Oliver Goldsmith:-She Stoops to Conquer, The Deserted Village, The Man  in Black

v  Dr. Samuel Johnson:-Preface to Shakespeare ,London ,Rasellas

v  Daniel Defoe:-A True –born English man , Robinson Crusoe, Raxona

v  Henry Fielding:-Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Amelia

 

ROMANTIC AGE [1785-1830]

Overview

English Romantic literature is overwhelmingly a poetic one, with six major poets writing in the first quarter of the 19th century, transforming the literary climate. Blake was unknown; Wordsworth and Coleridge won partial acceptance in the first decade; Scott and Byron became popular. The flowering of the younger Romantics, Byron, Shelley and Keats, came after 1817, but by 1824 all were dead. The other great literary artist of the period is Jane Austen, whose six novels appeared anonymously between 1811 and 1818. Other books appearing without an author’s name were Lyrical Ballads (Bristol, 1798) and Waverley (Edinburgh, 1814). The novels of ‘the author of Waverley’, Sir Walter Scott, were wildly popular. There was original fiction from Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley, and non-fiction from Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt.

 

• Inaugurated with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads(1798)
• English Romanticism came from Germany
• Give importance to subjectivity
• Love for external nature
• Revival of lyricism
• Interest in medievalism
• The influence of French literature

Important writers and works

v  William Wordsworth:-The Prelude, The Excursion, Immortality  Ode

v  Samuel Taylor Coleridge:-Biographia Literaria , Kubla Khan ,  Scholar , Life of Nelson , Roderick

v  Lord Byron:-Child Harold’s Pilgrimage , House of Idleness Cain

v  Mercy Bysshe Shelly:-Ode to the West Wind ,Prometheus,  Unbound,

v  John Keats:-Isabella , Hyperion, Lamia , ode to Nightingale

v  Jane Austen:-Pride and Prejudice, Emma

 

VICTORIAN PERIOD [1830-1901]

 

Overview

Victoria’s long reign saw a growth in literature, especially in fiction, practised notably by Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Trollope, James and Hardy. Poetry too was popular, especially that of Tennyson; Browning and (though then unknown) Hopkins are also major poets. Thinkers, too, were eagerly read. Matthew Arnold, poet, critic and social critic, was the last to earn the respectful hearing given earlier to such sages as Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin and

Newman. Many Victorians allowed their understanding to be led by thinkers, poets, even novelists. It was an age both exhilarated and bewildered by growing wealth and power, the pace of industrial and social change, and by scientific discovery.

 

• It extends to the death of Queen Victoria
• Industrial Revolution
• Mood of Nationalistic power
• Social stress
• Spiritual conflicts was  evident
• Publication of Origin of Species

Important writers and works

v  Lord Tennyson:-Ulysses, Lotus Eaters , Idllus of the King

v  Robert Browning:-The Lady of Shallot ,Fra Lippo Lippi , Men and  Women

v  Mathew Arnold:-Dover Beach , Scholar Gypsy , Essays on Criticism

v  Charles Dickens:-David Copperfield ,Dickwide Papers, Hard times

v  Thomas Hardy:-Tess of D’Umbervilles ,Far from the Madding Crowd

 

THE MODERN PERIOD [1890-1918]

 

In this age the modern writers are often called modernists. The word ‘modernism’ is a convenience term, for the ‘-ism’ of the new is hard to define; it therefore appears in this text without a capital letter. Although the present had begun - before 1914 - to feel more than usually different from the past, there were no agreed principles for an artistic program. Rather, the old ways would not do any more. Behind this cultural shift were changes in society, politics and technology, and slackening family, local and religious ties. As the value for the human person fostered by Christianity and continuing in liberal humanism weakened, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, the fathers of modern atheism, were read. But these general factors do not point to an obvious formulation which fits these writers as a group. Ambitious, they broke with prevailing formal conventions. ‘Modern Art’, meaning the painting of Picasso, the music of Stravinsky and the poetry of Eliot, soon became a historical label.

Overview .

Two pieces of writing published in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, differed in form from the novels and poems that had preceded them. This was the crest of a new wave in English literature, from Ezra Pound’s Lustra and Joyce’s Dubliners in 1914 to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in 1927. The modern writing of Joyce, Pound, Eliot and D. H. Lawrence came when Hardy, Conrad, Shaw, Kipling and Ford were still writing, and Yeats was becoming a powerful poet. This writing, new and old, makes the period 1914-27 the richest in 20th-century English literature. It may be the richest since the Romantics, and certainly since the years about 1850, when many novelists and poets flourished.

 

• Break with tradition
• Rejected Romantic conventions
• Traditional verse patterns were rejected
• The catastrophe of the world wars had shaken faith  in moral and spiritual life

Important writers and works

v  T . S. Eliot:- Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Man, The  Waste Land, Murder in the Cathedral

v  W . B .Yeats:- Sailing to Bysantium,September 1913

v  Ezra Pound:- Cantos

• W .H . Auden:-Age of Anxiety , Look Stranger
• D .H . Lawrence:-Sons And Lovers , Rainbow ,Women  in Love

Modern Novelists:

1.  E.M Foster
2.  James Joyce
3. Virgina Woolf
4. D.H Lawrence
5. Joseph Conard
6. Henry James

Important Works:

The Golden Bowl & The Years

A Passage to India & Voyage Out

The Dubliners & Light and Day

Ulysses & The Exiles

To the Light House & Lord Jim

 

Work Citation:
1.     McCann, Patrick. Introduction to British Literature
2.     Alexander, Michael. A history of English Literature. MACMILLAN PRTESS LTD. 2000
3.     Carter, Ronald and McRae, John. The Routledge History Of English Literature. 3^rd Edition. Routledge.
4.     Albert, Edward. History of English Literature. 5^th edition. Oxford University Press.
5.     Daiches, David. A Critical History Of English Literature. Vol-1 and 2. Random House India.
6.     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Literature