Outline of Major Literary Periods and Key Authors

I. Ancient & Classical Literature (before 500 CE)

• Greek & Roman Foundations
  
  

  • Homer (The Iliad, The Odyssey)

  • Sophocles (Oedipus Rex)

  • Euripides, Aristophanes (drama)

  • Virgil (The Aeneid)

  • Ovid (Metamorphoses)
    
    

• Themes: epic heroism, fate vs. free will, myth, tragedy, comedy
  
  

II. Medieval Literature (500–1500)

• Anglo-Saxon / Old English
  
  

  • Beowulf (anonymous epic)
    
    

• Middle English
  
  

  • Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)

  • William Langland (Piers Plowman)
    
    

• Continental
  
  

  • Dante (The Divine Comedy)

  • Boccaccio (The Decameron)
    
    

• Themes: religious allegory, chivalry, courtly love, morality plays
  
  

III. Renaissance (1500–1660)

• English Renaissance
  
  

  • William Shakespeare (plays, sonnets)

  • Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus)

  • Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene)

  • John Donne (Metaphysical poetry)
    
    

• Continental Renaissance
  
  

  • Cervantes (Don Quixote

  • Montaigne (Essays)
    
    

• Themes: humanism, exploration, love, individualism, metaphysical concerns
  
  

IV. Neoclassicism / Enlightenment (1660–1790)

• British
  
  

  • John Dryden (poetry, satire)

  • Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock)

  • Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, satire)

  • Samuel Johnson (dictionary, criticism)
    
    

• French / European
  
  

  • Voltaire (Candide)

  • Rousseau (The Social Contract)
    
    

• American
  
  

  • Benjamin Franklin (essays, Autobiography)

  • Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of Independence)
    
    

• Themes: reason, order, rationalism, satire, social commentary
  
  

V. Romanticism (1790–1850)

• British Romantics
  
  

  • William Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads)

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

  • Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats
    
    

• American Romanticism
  
  

  • Edgar Allan Poe (poetry, gothic short stories)

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

  • Herman Melville (Moby-Dick)
    
    

• Transcendentalism
  
  

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature)

  • Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
    
    

• Themes: nature, emotion, imagination, individualism, sublime
  
  

VI. Victorian Literature (1830–1900)

• British
  
  

  • Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, Oliver Twist)

  • Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

  • Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

  • George Eliot (Middlemarch)

  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson (poetry)

  • Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (poetry)
    
    

• American (Realism emerging)
  
  

  • Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

  • Emily Dickinson (poetry)
    
    

• Themes: social class, industrialization, morality, realism vs. romanticism
  
  

VII. Realism & Naturalism (1850–1914)

• American
  
  

  • Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

  • Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

  • Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)

  • Jack London (Call of the Wild)
    
    

• French / European
  
  

  • Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

  • Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina)
    
    

• Themes: everyday life, determinism, social critique
  
  

VIII. Modernism (1914–1945)

• British
  
  

  • James Joyce (Ulysses)

  • Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

  • T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land)
    
    

• American
  
  

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

  • Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

  • William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)

  • Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston (Harlem Renaissance)
    
    

• Themes: fragmentation, alienation, experimental form, disillusionment
  
  

IX. Postmodernism & Contemporary (1945–present)

• American
  
  

  • Toni Morrison (Beloved)

  • Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)

  • Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

  • Don DeLillo (White Noise)
    
    

• British
  
  

  • Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children)

  • Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber)
    
    

• World Literature
  
  

  • Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) – Magical Realism

  • Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart)

  • Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
    
    

• Themes: metafiction, identity, multiculturalism, playfulness with form