History is the base of English Literature. if you want full command over this subject you have to understand the literary periods. No doubt this is the most confusing task, however if one can remember little details.
The concept of literary period involves a grouping through time. Although a work, rather than being "placed" within the entire sweep of literary history, is "placed" within a much more restricted time frame. The period concept provides the system of classification, ordering literary and cultural data chronologically, within certain discrete time periods. It assumes every age has its characteristic special features, which are reflected in its representative artifacts or creations, literary terms, genres and stylistic qualities of literature. The kind of coherence displayed is not accidental, for literary works participate in the culture of their times !
What is the concept of Period?
It suggests,
(1) Literary works can be grouped according to what they share with each other within a given time span,
(2) That this grouping can be differentiated from other such chronological groupings.
Literary works share the
“system of norms” which includes conventions, styles, themes, and philosophies, as well as the social, political and economic perspective of specific era.
Finally, the attentive student may note that even the labeling of literary periods and movements does not always appear to be consistent. This has come about because the traditional names derive from a variety of sources. "Humanism" came from the history of ideas, and the "Renaissance" from art historians; "Restoration" came from political history, and "The Eighteenth Century" is strictly chronological; "Neoclassic" and "Romantic" came from literary theory, while both "Elizabethan" and "Victorian" came from the names of reigning monarchs.
Period Descriptors
The literary periods and movements following the classical period are usually labeled as follows:
• medieval (from the fall of Rome through the fourteenth or fifteenth century);
• Renaissance (from its earliest beginnings in Italy in the fourteenth century through the sixteenth century elsewhere in Europe, with a shift in some countries to "Baroque" in its last phase);
• the neoclassical (starting in the mid-seventeenth century, with its subsequent eighteenth-century development as the "Age of Enlightenment");
• the Romantic period (beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century and continuing at least through the middle of the nineteenth);
• the Realist movement and its late nineteenth century extension into "naturalism";
• and finally, the modern period, which has been given many names, all of them, so far, provisional.
600-1200 Old English (Anglo-Saxon)
Beowulf
1200-1500 Middle English
Geoffrey Chaucer
1500-1660 The English Renaissance
1500-1558 Tudor Period
Humanist Era
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