The literary periods

600-1200 Old English (Anglo-Saxon)
Beowulf

1200-1500 Middle English
Geoffrey Chaucer

1500-1660 The English Renaissance
1500-1558 Tudor Period
Humanist Era

• Thomas More
• John Skelton

1558-1603 Elizabethan Period
High Renaissance

• Edmund Spenser,
• Sir Philip Sidney,
• William Shakespeare

1603-1625 Jacobean Period
Mannerist Style (1590-1640) other styles: Metaphysical Poets; Devotional Poets

• Shakespeare
• John Donne
• George Herbert,
• Emilia Lanyer

1625-1649 Caroline Period
John Ford
John Milton

1649-1660 The Commonwealth & The Protectorate
Baroque Style, and later, Rococo Style

• Milton
• Andrew Marvell
• Thomas Hobbes

1660-1700 The Restoration
John Dryden

1700-1800 The Eighteenth Century
The Enlightenment;
Neoclassical Period;
The Augustan Age

• Alexander Pope,
• Jonathan Swift,
• Samuel Johnson

1785-1830 Romanticism
The Age of Revolution

• William Wordsworth,
• S.T. Coleridge
• Jane Austen,
• the Brontës

1830-1901 Victorian Period
Early, Middle and Late Victorian

• Charles Dickens
• George Eliot
• Robert Browning
• Alfred
• Lord Tennyson

1901-1960 Modern Period
The Edwardian Era
(1901-1910);
The Georgian Era
(1910-1914)

• G.M. Hopkins
• H.G. Wells
• James Joyce
• D.H. Lawrence
• T.S. Eliot

1960- Postmodern and Contemporary Period
Ted Hughes
Doris Lessing
John Fowles
Don DeLillo
A.S. Byatt