English IV

British Literature Time Periods

Overview of British Literary Time Periods & Key Authors

• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Literature: 449-1485 (Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Chaucer)

• English Renaissance and 17th Century Literature: 1485-1625 (Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson)

• Restoration and 18th Century/Enlightenment & Age of Reason: 1625-1798 (Milton, Pope, Gray, Swift, Defoe, Wollstonecraft)

• The Romantic Period: 1798-1832 (Austen, Shelley, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, etc.)

• Victorian Literature: 1833-1901 (Wilde, Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, Bronte, Kipling, Harding)

• Modern and Postmodern British Literature: 1901-Present (Wells, Greene, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Orwell, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf)