Literary Ages

 

📚 Literary Periods (Chronological Order)

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

• Beowulf, epic poetry, riddles

🏰 2. Middle English Period (1066–1500)

• Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

• Religious and courtly literature

👑 3. The Renaissance (1500–1660)

a. Elizabethan Era (1558–1603)

• Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney

b. Jacobean Era (1603–1625)

• John Donne, Ben Jonson

c. Caroline & Commonwealth Era (1625–1660)

• Cavalier poets, Metaphysical Poetry – Literary Movement, Milton

🎭 4. The Neoclassical Period (1660–1798)

a. Restoration Age (1660–1700)

• Dryden, satire, comedy of manners

b. Augustan Age (1700–1745)

• Pope, Swift, prose and poetry

c. Age of Sensibility / Pre-Romantic (1745–1798)

• Johnson, Gray, Burns

🌿 5. The Romantic Period (1798–1837)

• Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley

🎩 6. The Victorian Period (1837–1901)

• Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, Brontë sisters

🧠 7. The Edwardian Period (1901–1914)

• H.G. Wells, Galsworthy, Kipling

🌍 8. The Modern Period (1914–1945)

• Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Orwell

🔄 9. The Postmodern Period (1945–Present)

• Samuel Beckett, Pynchon, Rushdie, Angela Carter

🌐 10. Contemporary Literature (1980s–Present)

• Multiculturalism, digital/experimental literature

• Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy