The Eras of Literature

The Eras OfLiterature

Emily Bryan

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Medieval

The Eras

The Middle Age

The Renaissance

The Restoration

The Augustan Age

The Age of Johnson

The Romantics

The Victorian Period

The Edwardian Era

Modernism

Post-Modernism

Medieval Literature

The 10th and 11th Centuries

Historical & PoliticalInfluences

• The introduction of Christianity by the Romans
• The rise of Saxon kingdoms & Augustine and Irish missionaries convert Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, introducing new religious words borrowed from Latin and Greek
• The Danes establish a kingdom at York
• King Alfred of Wessex leads the Anglo-Saxons to victory over the Vikings - translates Latin works into English and establishes the writing of prose
• The Battle of Maldon becomes the subject of one of the few surviving poems in Old English
• The Norman Invasion The Benedictine Reform

Characteristics & Key Writers and TheirTexts

• Beowulf – the first English epic poem (3182 lines). A brave young man, Beowulf, sails to Denmark with a band of warriors to safe the King of Denmark, Hrothgar from Grendel. After being rewarded and becoming King, he slays a dragon but suffers a mortal wound and dies.

• Other poems include: Widsith, Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Wife’s Lament, Husband’s Message, Christ and Satan, Daniel, Andreas, Guthlac, The Dream of the Rood, and The Battle of Maldon.

• Two important figures in Old English poetry are Cynewulf and Caedmon, who wrote religious poems. Aelfric: Grammar, Homilies and Lives of the Saints.

• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - a historical record begun about the time of King Alfred’s reign (871–899) and continuing for more than three centuries

Key Features ofthe Period

• Alliterative verse style - each line in the poem has at least four stressed syllables of alliterative words
• The kenning, a metaphorical phrase used in place of a common noun
• Old English prose works include legal writings, medical tracts, religious texts, and translations from Latin and other languages

II

The Middle Age

1100 - 1500

Historical & PoliticalInfluences

• The Roman Catholic Church, access to heaven and the wheel of fortune
• The ‘Black Death’
• French poetry
• Bilingualism and trilingualism
• The Hundred Years’ War
• The Wars of the Roses
• The Peasants’ Revolt (1381)
• The rise of Lollardism (centred on Wycliffe’s religious teachings)

Key Characteristics of the Period

• Didactic poetry - poetry that instructs, either in terms of morals or by providing knowledge of philosophy, religion, arts, science, or skills
• Verse romance
• Chivalry
• Feudalism
• Springtime
• Miracle and mystery plays
• Religion
• Morality

Key Writers and Their Titles

• The Owl and the Nightingale – an example of the popular debate genre. The two birds argue topics ranging from their hygienic habits, looks, and songs to marriage, prognostication, and the proper modes of worship. The nightingale stands for the joyous aspects of life, the owl for the somber; there is no clear winner, but the debate ends as the birds go off to state their cases to one Nicholas of Guildford, a wise man.

• Ormulum by Orm – an Augustinian canon in the north of England. An example of didactic poetry. 20,000 lines arranged in unrhymed but metrically rigid couplets.

• Geoffrey Chaucer – The Book of the Duchess, Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales.

• Piers Plowman by William Langland

• Ludus de Sancta Katharina – the earliest Miracle on record in England

III

The Renaissance

1550 - 1660

Historical & PoliticalInfluences

• Black Plague
• The rise of constitutional monarchy
• The Hundred Year’s War
• The Avignon Papacy
• The invasion of America by the Spanish (1492)
• The fall of Constantinople (1453)
• The discovery of America (1492)
• The invention of the printing press

Key Charateristics of the Period

The classical culture of Greece and Rome was recovered, a fact considered the rebirth of tradition. The reason was valued above the faith and Greco-Roman philosophy opposed the ideas of the Catholic Church. The human being was considered the center of the world (unlike the Middle Ages in which God was the center of the universe ). Nature was considered a symbol of perfection and a source of pleasure.

• Love: It was the central axis of lyrical poetry, which leaves God as the center and recognizes women as an object of admiration.
• Nature: It was idealized for its great beauty and for the feelings generated by its great magnitude and perfection.
• Mythology: It was a repetitive theme through the most prominent characters of ancient Greece.

• Edmund Spenser (1552-1599): He was an English poet considered one of the pioneers and most influential of the English language. One of his main works was The Fairy Queen.

• William Shakespeare (1564-1616): He was an English playwright and poet considered the most recognized writer in the English language. One of his main works was Romeo and Juliet.

• Thomas More (1478-1535): He was an English thinker, theologian, humanist, and writer. One of his main works was Utopia.

• Luís de Camões (1524 - 1580): He was a Portuguese writer and poet considered one of the greatest exponents of the Portuguese language. One of his main works was The Lusíadas.

• Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585): He was a French writer and poet considered in his time as “the prince of poets.” One of his main works was Los amores de Casandra.

Key Writers and Their Texts

• Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): He was an Italian poet who stood out, in particular, for one of his works, considered fundamental for the transition from medieval to Renaissance thought: The Divine Comedy.
• Jean Molière (1622-1673): He was a French playwright and poet considered one of the best writers in world literature. One of his main works was Tartufo.
• Nicholas Machiavelli (1469 - 1527): He was a diplomat, political philosopher and writer considered the father of Political Science. One of his main works was The Prince.
• Baltasar Castiglione (1478 - 1529): He was an Italian diplomat and writer who wrote lyrical poetry in vulgar language and Latin poetry. One of his main works was The Courtier.
• Miguel Cervantes (1547 - 1616): He was a Spanish novelist, poet and soldier, and one of the most renowned writers of Spanish literature. One of his main works was Don Quixote de la Mancha.

IV

The Neoclassical Period

1660 - 1789

The Restoration1660 - 1770

Historical & PoliticalInfluences

• The restored court of Charles II
• The change of government from Commonwealth to Kingship
• Religious controversy
• The revolution of 1688
• The reopening of theatres
• The Great Fire of London (1666)
• The decline of morality
• Corruption
• The rise of the Whigs and the Tories

Characteristics & Key Writers and TheirTexts

• William Congreve (1670-1729): a comedy of manners writer famous for The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love For Love and The Way of the World.

• Abraham Cowley was one of the literary figures in the field of writing essays, mostly centered on the topic of morality. His well-known works include On myself and Davideis.

• John Dryden: Dryden was a significant Restoration writer. As England’s first official Poet Laureate, he wrote plays, verses, and essays that comment on every important event of his day. In addition, he played a huge role in formation of literary taste and poets’ reputations through his criticism in verse, and by editing anthologies of contemporary poems he considered worthy. Well-known works include Alexander’s Feast, Mack Flecknoe, and Absalom and Achitophel.

• Aphra Behn, The Rover, 1677: Aphra Behn, said to be England’s first professional woman writer, wrote this Restoration Comedy from a woman’s perspective, featuring a group of engaging young women who vocally reject the roles expected of young women of the time

Key Features ofthe Period

• Imitation of the Ancient masters
• Imitation of the French masters
• Journalism
• Love
• Honor
• Heroic tragedy
• Rationalism
• Comedy of manners

The Augustan Age1702 - 1760

Significant HistoricalDates

• 1702: Death of William III. Succeeded by Anne, Protestant daughter of James II.
• 1707: Act of Union with Scotland.
• 1710: Tories take power.
• 1714: Death of Queen Anne. George I, great-grandson of James I, is first Hanoverian king. Whigs assume power over Tories.
• 1720: South Sea bubble investment scheme collapses.
• 1721: Robert Walpole comes to power.
• 1727: George I dies. George II succeeds.
• 1737: Licensing Act censors the stage.
• 1742: Handel’s Messiah has first performance, in Dublin.
• 1746: Charles Edward Stuart’s defeat at Culloden; ends Jacobite Rebellion.

Characteristics & Key Writers and TheirTexts

• Alexander Pope: Like many other writers of his time, Pope honored the Classics, particularly Horace, Virgil, and Homer, adapting classical form and style to English poetry. As a Catholic, he was not allowed to go to college or obtain a government position. Instead, he was one of the first English writers to make a living solely through literature, his first commercial success being a popular translation of The Iliad. Works include: The Rape of the Lock, An Essay on Criticism and an Essay on Man.

• Jonathan Swift: an important and respected writer of his day, a friend of Pope, a Tory loyal to the Royals, and a staunch supporter of the Church and religious principles. His most frequent writing mode is satirical, painting a fairly critical view of personkind. His narrow view of humanity is certainly on display in the famous Gulliver’s Travels. It was a pointed satire against the wily, rising Whig Prime Minister Robert Walpole, as well as an excoriating critique of political and religious follies of Swift’s time.

• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719: With Robinson Crusoe, Defoe sought to capitalize on the popular memoir genre by writing a fiction as if it were a real memoir. He succeeded so well that Crusoe’s first readers thought Crusoe was a real person.

Key Features ofthe Period

• Response against rival authors
• The concept of individualism versus society
• The imitation of the classics
• Politics and social issues, bold political writings
• Satire and irony
• Empiricism - the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses
• Comedy
• Patriotism
• Nature

The Jacobite AgeThe Age of 'Sensibility'1750 - 1789

Significant HistoricalDates

• 1757: Indian Provinces of Bengal pass into British control after Battle of Plassey
• 1760: George II dies. George III becomes King.
• 1771: Opening of Britain’s first cotton mill.
• 1772: Slavery effectively outlawed in England
• 1774: Methodist founder John Wesley publishes “Thoughts on Slavery,” with moral arguments against it
• 1776: American rebellion/”War for Independence”
• 1780: Gordon Riots (for rights of workers) in London.
• 1789: French Revolution.

Characteristics & Key Writers and TheirTexts

Samuel Johnson: a writer who towers over the 18th Century; living as he did toward the end of the era, and writing in so many genres with reasoned criticism about every important topic, he can almost be taken as a commentator on the entire era. His writing is dense, not because it is muddy or hard to understand, but because every single sentence is so packed with meaning. Works include: The Vanity of Human Wishes; The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia; On Idleness, On Fiction, A Dictionary of the English Language, etc. William Collins: followed classical models, as well as Milton, in the form of his poems, but his subject matter was similar to what would preoccupy romantic poets to come later in the 1790s and early 1800s. Johnson complained that Collins was too fond of the supernatural side of Classical works, populating his poems with nymphs and fairies and the like. But the overall character of the works is serene, peaceful, and simple. Ode to Simplicity, Ode to Evening, and Ode on Political Character. William Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 1771. William Smollett was one of young Charles Dickens’s favorite writers, and Humphrey Clinker may have been a model for his breakout hit Pickwick Papers. In Clinker, Smollett uses the epistolary technique (story told through letters) to recount the travels around England and Scotland of the family of Squire Matthew Bramble. Fanny Burney, Evelina, 1778. Fanny Burney is an important author to those who love Jane Austen, who would be writing about 30 years later. Burney led the way in showing that “nice” women could write for money. Her brand of domestic comedy in Evelina, focusing on a young ingenue’s encounters with high society, provided a model for Austen’s plots and subject matter. In this novel, a well-cared for orphan country girl Evelina visits the city for the first time along with her aunt who offers to chaperone. She makes multiple etiquette mistakes while meeting young men that she hates, as well as one man she comes to love. Her kindly adopted father has not told her about her true parentage, so she must also navigate the various relatives she meets who want to influence and control her.

Key Features ofthe Period

• Sentimentalism

• The Gothic genre

• The beauty and value of nature

• Romanticism

The Romantics

1789 - 1832

Significant HistoricalDates

• 1789: French Revolution begins; Storming of the Bastille on July 14
• 1793-4: French Reign of Terror under Robespierre
• 1793: King Louis XVI executed
• 1804: Napoleon crowned Emperor of France
• 1807: Slave Trade Act makes trading slaves illegal, although slavery as an institution continues
• 1811-20: The Regency: George, Prince of Wales, acts as regent for George III, declared insane
• 1820: Accession of George IV
• 1830: Accession of William IV
• 1833: Slavery Abolition Act outlaws slavery in most British territories.

Key Charateristics of the Period

• Imagination
• Creativity
• Glorification of nature
• Individualism
• Solitude
• Romantic love
• Awareness and acceptance of emotion
• Everyday speech (in poetry)
• Emphasis on aesthetic beauty
• Spiritual and supernatural elements
• Vivid sensory descriptions

William Wordsworth: together with Coleridge, he forged the Romantic manifesto that described why he rejected the formal language and general, cultured themes of poems of past centuries, instead focusing on simple tales about common people and descriptions of the powerful effects of nature on soul and spirit, rendered in simple, common speech. Published in 1798: “We Are Seven,” “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “Expostulation and Reply,” and “The Tables Turned.” Published in 1800: The Lucy Poems: “Strange Fits of Passion,” “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” “Three Years She Grew,” and “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” Published in 1807: “Resolution and Independence,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “My Heart Leaps Up,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Solitary Reaper,” “London, 1802,” “The World is Too Much With Us,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight.”

Key Writers and Their Texts

Traditional Ballads: “Barbara Allen,” “Patrick Spens,” “The Daemon Lover (James Harris).” Ballads are usually composed in quatrains of alternating lines of 4 and 3 iambs with an ABAB rhyme scheme– a simple danceable and singable meter. Poets like Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, and Keats took inspiration from both ballad form and subject matter of these traditional songs, which always told a melodramatic and unforgettable story. William Blake: “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” 1789 and 1794; “The Book of Thel,” 1789-91; “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” 1790-93; “Auguries of Innocence,” 1803 (pub 1863). Blake was passionate about humankind’s universal fight for freedom from tyranny and the plight of the poor. However, of all poets of this era, Blake had the most abstract, prophetic, and far-reaching vision of how humans functioned psychologically, and how modern life and mistaken morals fractured and squelched the potentially divine human spirit.

VI

The Victorian Period

1837 - 1901

Historical & PoliticalInfluences

• The Industrial Revolution
• Poverty
• Child labour
• The British Empire
• Exploitation
• The rise of the bourgeoisie
• Feminine code of conduct
• Improvements in education

Key Charateristics of the Period

• Realism
• Sentimental tones
• Preference for happy endings (early)
• Novels became a dominant the dominant genre
• Horror novels and detective stories (later)
• Social issues of the day
• The GloriousPpast
• Imperialism
• Gender
• Class
• Family hierarchy

One of the most famous Victorian authors was Charles Dickens. His realistic novels were immensely popular and succeeded in combining satire and seriousness. Thematically, Dickens focuses on social class, the need for social reforms, and the consequences of industrialization. Some of his most famous novels include Oliver Twist (1837-1838), Hard Times (1854), and Great Expectations (1860-1861). A different topic, the role of women, was explored by female authors such as the Brontë sisters. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) depicts an unusually independent woman who pursues love and equality despite starting out as an orphan and governess. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) focused on the passionate, destructive romance between Catherine and Heathcliff. In many ways, the Brontë novels are not Victorian in style. Due to their raging emotions and Gothic elements, they are closer to Romanticism. But they still debate “the woman question”, which gradually became a hot topic throughout the period.

Key Writers and Their Texts

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker both explore human psychology Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth and Robert Browning and Rudyard Kipling (poetry)

VII

The Edwardian Era

1901 - 1910

Significant HistoricalDates

• 1901 - Edward VII becomes King
• 1902 - Balfour's Education Act - placed the administration of all elementary schools in the hands of local education authorities and encouraged the development of secondary education
• 1903 - The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded by six women, including Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst
• 1904 - Liberals win General Election on a platform of social reform
• 1907 - Britain agrees spheres of influence with Russia, forming the so-called Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia - as opposed to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy (1882)
• 1908 - The Olympic Games are held in London
• 1910 - Suffragettes, imprisoned for offences such as willful damage, begin to go on hunger strike; eventually, the authorities decide to force-feed them, Edward VII dies; George V becomes King

Key Charateristics of the Period

• Protagonists who looked introspectively
• Thought critically about the moralism and technological advances of the previous era
• Subversive ideas were presented metaphorically, symbolically, and in opposition to the liberating force of nature
• Fears and social anxiety surrounding technological advances and consumerism
• Female protagonists

D.H Lawrence was a striking figure in the twentieth century literary world. He produced over forty volumes of fiction during his period. The White Peacock is his earliest novel. The largely autobiographical and extremely powerful novel was Sons and Lovers. It studies with great insight the relationship between a son and mother. By many, it is considered the best of all his works. Virginia Woolf famed both as a literary critic and novelist. Her first novel, The Voyage Out is told in the conventional narrative manner. A deeper study of characters can be found in her later works such as Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando. In addition to her novels, Virginia Woolf wrote a number of essays on cultural subjects. Woolf rejected the conventional concepts of novel. She replaced emphasis on incident, external description, and straight forward narration by using the technique “Stream of Consciousness”. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf popularized this writing technique. George Orwell

Key Writers and Their Texts

• E.M Forster wrote five novels in his life-time. Where Angels Fear to Tread has well-drawn characters. Other novels are The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. A Passage to India is unequal in English in its presentation of the complex problems which were to be found in the relationship between English and native people in India. E.M Forster portrayed the Indian scene in all its magic and all its wretchedness.

• H.G Wells began his career as a journalist. He started his scientific romances with the publication of The Time Machine. The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon and The Food of the Gods are some of his important science romances. Ann Veronica, Kipps and The History of Mr Polly are numbered among his sociological novels

VIII

Modernism

1900 - 1950

Historical & PoliticalInfluences

• World War I
• World War II
• Industrialism
• New political parties
• The Great Depression
• The “Roaring Twenties”
• Prohibition
• The Spanish Civil War
• The Nuclear Age (Hiroshima and Nagasaki)

Key Charateristics of the Period

• Experimentation, e.g., free verse
• Individualism
• Absurdity
• Symbolism
• Formalism
• The ‘stream of consciousness’
• The use of comparison, symbolism, discontinuous narrative, and psychoanalysis
• Often the works had multiple narratives
• An attempt to break away from traditions

Key Writers and Their Texts

• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous work The Great Gatsby focuses on the corruption of the American Dream.

• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, perhaps the most important poem in all of modernism. Eliot draws on personal experience (his first marriage, his knowledge of London, his convalescence following some sort of nervous breakdown) but transmutes it into something universal and, in his word, ‘impersonal’– a poem that spoke for an entire generation.
• Written during WWI and focusing on the men and women who work on the trams in Nottingham, ‘Tickets, Please’ by D. H. Lawrence examines the shifting gender roles in the early twentieth century and the latent desires and impulses which Freudian psychoanalysis had lain bare.

• Like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound was born in the United States but moved to Europe – and London – as a young man. His two most famous works are among the longest and shortest in canonical ‘English’ literature: The Cantos runs to nearly a thousand pages, while ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913) is just two lines in length. It’s one of the defining poems of the imagist movement in modern poetry.

• Published in the annus mirabilis of modernism, 1922, Ulysses is James Joyce’s masterpiece. It’s also one of the best modernist novels ever written. The novel is a retelling of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, about Greek hero Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan Wars (a journey which took him ten years, but which Joyce condenses to a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904).

IX

Post-Modernism

1940s Onwards

Characteristics & Key Writers and TheirTexts

Postmodern literature reached its peak in the ’60s and ’70s with the publication of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Lost in the Funhouse and Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, “factions” like Armies in the Night and In Cold Blood by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, postmodern science fiction novels like Necromancer by William Gibson, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the ’80’s with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a very popular anti-war novel that uses science fiction, satire, and humor to convey the absurdity of war and the way it impacts people. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, a staple of the magical realism genre. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. Set in a dismal dystopian England, it is the first-person account of a juvenile delinquent who undergoes state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation for his aberrant behaviour. The novel satirizes extreme political systems that are based on opposing models of the perfectibility or incorrigibility of humanity. Written in a futuristic slang vocabulary invented by Burgess, in part by adaptation of Russian words, it was his most original and best-known work.

Key Features ofthe Period

• Fabulation (the rejection of realism)
• Fiction
• Humour
• Feminist literature
• Relativism
• Rejection of objectivity
• Complexity
• Abstraction
• Social constructs
• Nihilism
• Materialism
• Individualism
• Culture
• Rejection of agency