1. Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period (450–1066)

  • Context: Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) settled in Britain.
  • Literature: Mostly oral; heroic poetry, religious writings.
  • Features: Alliteration, kennings, strong rhythm, pagan + Christian themes.
  • Major Works: Beowulf, The Seafarer, The Wanderer.
  • Writers: Caedmon, Cynewulf.

2. Middle English Period (1066–1500)

  • Context: Norman Conquest influenced language and culture.

  • Features: Growth of romances, allegories, religious writings.

  • Forms: Rhymed verse, ballads, morality plays.

  • Major Writers:

    • Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)
    • William Langland (Piers Plowman)
    • Sir Thomas Malory (Le Morte d’Arthur)

3. The Renaissance (1500–1660)

a) Early Tudor (1500–1558)

  • Court poetry, humanism.
  • Writers: Sir Thomas More (Utopia), Sir Thomas Wyatt (sonnets).

b) Elizabethan Age (1558–1603)

  • Golden Age of drama & poetry.
  • Writers: William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene), Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney.

c) Jacobean Age (1603–1625)

  • Darker themes in drama.
  • Writers: Ben Jonson, John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi), Shakespeare’s late plays.

d) Caroline Age (1625–1649)

  • Metaphysical poets, Cavalier poets.
  • Writers: John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Lovelace.

e) Commonwealth/ Puritan Age (1649–1660)

  • Political and religious prose.
  • Writers: John Milton (Paradise Lost), Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan).

4. The Restoration and 18th Century (1660–1798)

a) Restoration (1660–1700)

  • Comedy of manners, heroic drama.
  • Writers: John Dryden, William Congreve, Aphra Behn.

b) Augustan Age (1700–1745)

  • Satire, reason, classical influence.
  • Writers: Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Joseph Addison, Richard Steele.

c) Age of Sensibility (1745–1798)

  • Pre-Romanticism, sentimental literature.
  • Writers: Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, early Romantic poets (Blake, Burns).

5. The Romantic Period (1798–1837)

  • Context: Reaction against Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
  • Features: Emotion, imagination, nature, individualism.
  • Major Poets: William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, John Keats.
  • Novelists: Walter Scott, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein).

6. The Victorian Period (1837–1901)

  • Context: Age of progress, science, empire, moral concern.
  • Features: Realism, social criticism, conflict between faith and doubt.
  • Novelists: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, the Brontë sisters.
  • Poets: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti.
  • Prose Writers: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill.

7. The Edwardian Period (1901–1914)

  • Realist and naturalist novels; social issues.
  • Writers: E. M. Forster (Howards End), H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett.

8. The Georgian Period (1910–1936)

  • Poets writing about rural/nature themes before WWI.
  • Writers: Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas.

9. The Modern Period (1914–1945)

  • Context: Impact of WWI and WWII, breakdown of old values.
  • Features: Stream of consciousness, symbolism, fragmentation, experimentation.
  • Novelists: James Joyce (Ulysses), Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster.
  • Poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden.
  • Dramatists: Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), T. S. Eliot (Murder in the Cathedral).

10. The Postmodern Period (1945–Present)

  • Features: Irony, metafiction, pastiche, questioning truth and authority.
  • Novelists: Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan.
  • Poets: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy.
  • Drama: Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill.