Brief introduction to the history of English. It's a very educative introduction as it highlights points for easy understanding for students. Furthermore it's a complete research summary that contain simple language that can be understood by every student. I therefore recommend that students to look into this. The period are arranged systematically for attractive surface for students to maintain focus when learning.

1. History of English Literature
Shazia Akbar Ghilzai

2. OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE
• The Old English language or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest form of English.
The period is a long one and it is generally considered that Old English
was spoken from about A.D. 600 to about 1100.
• The Anglo-Norman Period (1066 to 1350)
Anglo-Norman Period comes after the ending of the Anglo Saxon Period.
• Middle English Period
The age of Chaucer and After Chaucer is considered as entire Middle
English period. Chaucer and his contemporaries (1350-1400), Chaucer’s
successors (1350-1558).

3. The Medieval Period
• The medieval era, often called The Middle Ages began around 476 A.D.
following a great loss of power throughout Europe by the Roman
Emperor. The Middle Ages span roughly 1,000 years, ending between
1400 and 1450.
• The Middle Ages, the medieval period of European history between the
fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, are
sometimes referred to as the "Dark Ages."

4. Major Periods/16th Century
• The Renaissance and Reformation (1485-1660 CE) /Early Tudor Period
(1485-1558)
• Elizabethan Period (1558-1603)
• Jacobean Period(1603-1625) Caroline Age (1625-1649)
• Commonwealth Period/ Puritan Interregnum(1649-1660)

5. 17th century
17th Century
The Puritan
age
Age of Milton
1600-1660
The Restoration Period
Age of Dryden
1660-1700
Neo-classicism: 1680-1750
Generally this period is known as Augustan Age. Dryden + pope

6. 17th century
• John Milton (1608 - 1674)
• John Dryden (1631 - 1700),
• John Donne (1572 - 1631)

7. 18th century/The Augustan age
• The Augustan age: 1701–1750. The late 17th, early 18th century (1689–
1750) in English literature is known as the Augustan Age.
The classical age
The age of pope
1700-1750 Age of Johnson
1750-1789

8. The Romantic Age(1800-1837)
The Romantic Period began roughly around 1798 and lasted until 1837.
The political and economic atmosphere at the time heavily influenced this
period, with many writers finding inspiration from the French Revolution.
There was a lot of social change during this period. Calls for the abolition
of slavery became louder during this time, with more writing openly about
their objections. After the Agricultural Revolution people moved away
from the countryside and farmland and into the cities, where the Industrial
Revolution provided jobs and technological innovations, something that
would spread to the United States in the 19th century.

9. The Romantic Age(1800-1837
• Romanticism was a reaction against this spread of industrialism, as well
as a criticism of the aristocratic social and political norms and a call for
more attention to nature. Although writers of this time did not think of
themselves as Romantics, Victorian writers later classified them in this
way because of their ability to capture the emotion and tenderness of
man.
• Robert Burns, William Blake, Wordsworth , Coleridge
• Robert Burns: Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience
(1794).

10. The Romantic Age(1800-1837)
• Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads (1798), The Solitary Reaper” (1807), The
Prelude (1850).
• Coleridge: the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Kubla Khan (1816)
and Christabel (1816).
• The Second Generation of Romantic Poets
Succeeding Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth was a new generation of
poets, each following the pattern of Romanticism of those before them.
John Keats : “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
(1819).

11. The Romantic Age(1800-1837)
• Shelley: Adonais (1821), Ode to the West Wind (1819).
• Byron: Don Juan (1819-1824), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1816)
• Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813),
Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Northanger Abbey (1817).
• The English Romantic Period ended with the coronation of Queen
Victoria in 1837. The Industrial Revolution was beginning to be fully felt
by the people of England as the working class became dominant in the
culture. Most significant would be the introduction of the steam printing
press and the railroads, which would make it possible to easily make and
distribute texts.

12. The Victorian period
• The Victorian period of literature roughly coincides with the years that
Queen Victoria ruled Great Britain and its Empire (1837-1901).
• During this era, Britain was transformed from a predominantly rural,
agricultural society into an urban, industrial one.
• This period is popularly known as a time of conservative moral values,
the Victorians perceived their world as rapidly changing.
• The working class, women, and people of color were agitating for the
right to vote and rule themselves. Reformers fought for safe workplaces,
sanitary reforms, and universal education. Victorian literature reflects
these values, debates, and cultural concerns.

13. The Victorian period
• Victorian literature differs from that of the eighteenth century and
Romantic period most significantly because it was not aimed at a
specialist or elite audience; rather, because the steam printing press
made the production of texts much cheaper and because railroads could
distribute texts quickly and easily, the Victorian period was a time when
new genres appealed to newly mass audiences.
• William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Tennyson,

14. The Victorian period
• The Victorians experimented with narrative poetry, which tells a story
to its audience. Victorian poets also developed a new form called the
dramatic monologue, in which a speaker recites the substance of the
poem to an audience within the poem itself.
• Another Victorian genre, melodrama, achieved popularity by upholding
popular values. Melodramas divide characters starkly into those who are
vicious and those who are virtuous. They evoke emotion in readers and
viewers by making virtuous characters the subject of vicious plots. These
were some of the most popular theatrical productions of the period.

15. The Victorian period
• The period saw the British Empire grow to become the first global
industrial power, producing much of the world's coal, iron, steel and
textiles. The Victorian era saw revolutionary breakthroughs in the arts
and sciences, which shaped the world as we know it today.
• In literature, Victorians wanted to combine the reflection in ideas of
self realization, emotions and imagination with the Neoclassical
literature. The novels appearing are Hard Times by Charles Dickens,
Vanity Fair by William Thackeray, and Jude the Obscure by Thomas
Hardy.

16. Why was Victorian Age called compromise?
• In the late 19th century patriotism was influenced by ideas of racial
superiority. Since the Victorians, under the strict reign of Queen
Victoria, had to compromise many essential features of individuality
and modes of expression, the term 'Victorian Compromise' came to be
coined and applied to this particular age.
• But on the other hand, Victorian society dealt with conflicts of morality,
technology and industry, faith and doubt, imperialism, and rights of
women and ethnic minorities. Many Victorian writers addressed both
sides of these conflicts in many forms of literature.

17. The Victorian period
• Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (1837-39), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard
Times (1854).
• Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855)
• Rudyard Kipling celebrated British rule in India with his novel Kim
(1901), in which the young Kim becomes a British spy in India.
• The nineteenth century is frequently seen as the golden age of
children’s literature. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) narrate the story of Alice,
who finds herself in a place called “Wonderland” populated by grinning
cats, mad hatters, and an evil queen.

18. The Victorian period
• Thomas Hardy : Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892) and Jude the Obscure
(1895).
• H. G. Wells imagined future worlds in The Time Machine (1895) and an
alien invasion in The War of the Worlds (1897).
• Oscar Wilde wrote hilariously witty plays like The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895) which describes the comic endeavors of two men who
are trying to marry two women, both of whom are determined to marry
men named Ernest.

19. Modern Age (1900-to date)
• Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America, and is
characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing,
in both poetry and prose fiction writing.