The document provides an overview of the key periods in European literature, detailing their characteristics, notable authors, and seminal works. It covers the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism/Naturalism, Victorian period, Modernism, and Post-Modernism, highlighting the evolution of themes and styles across these periods. Each section outlines significant literary movements and influential thinkers that shaped European literary traditions from the 1400s to the present.

1. B R I T TA N Y AV E S
A HISTORY OF
EUROPEAN LITERATURE

2. PERIODS OF LITERATURE:
•Renaissance: 1400’s-1600’s
•Enlightenment: 1650- 1800
•Romanticism: 1798 – 1870
•Realism/Naturalism: 1850-1914
•Victorian Period: 1832- 1901
•Modernism: 1870’s – 1965
•Post-Modernism: 1965- Present
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

4. RENAISSANCE (1400’S-1600’S)
• The Renaissance was a period of transition that left behind
the medieval ways of the past and launched society towards
a modern world.
• At this time, people were concerned with individualism, as
well as self and societal improvement.
• Many writers produced pieces that catered to wealthy patrons
who commissioned their work.
• Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press in 1440,
allowing for mass production of pamphlets and novels.
• This gave people an increased opportunity to read
publications of various authors like Petrarch and Boccaccio.
(Wheeler, Kagan)

5. RENAISSANCE WORKS OF NOTE
• Petrarch: Canzoniere, Trionfi
• Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron
• Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince
• John Milton: Paradise Lost
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Dante Alighieri: Divina Commedia
• Sir Thomas More, Utopia
• William Shakespeare: King Lear,
Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet
• Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
"Paradise Lost," Stanford University Libraries
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

6. RENAISSANCE
• Authors of Renaissance literature presented many
revolutionary ideas during this period in history (1485- 1680
C.E.) that focused on the central topics of humanism,
classicism and secularism.
• Humanism: People were intrigued by the idea of human
power. Humanistic works focused on human traits and
abilities.
• Classicism: Authors drew on antiquity, were inspired by the
works of the philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome.
• Secularism: Dealt with issues of politics and personal concern
outside of the realm of religion.
(Wheeler, Kagan)

7. RENAISSANCE MEN
• Erasmus: Known as the “Christian Gentleman” (Eder, 46)
embodied the essential traits of the Renaissance humanist.
Erasmus translated the bible into new Greek and Latin
editions and was an opinionated critic of the religious figures
of the time. He criticized those who abused their religious
power, and satirized the overall hypocrisy of the age. Many
historians hypothesize that Erasmus planted the seeds for
Martin Luther’s radical protestant reformation.
• Petrarch: Considered to be the first modern writer. Known for
his sonnets and other works, which evaluated life and the
human condition.
(Eder, Kagan)

8. RENAISSANCE MEN
• Machiavelli: The author of The Prince, Machiavelli was likely
a sarcastic author, rather than the brutal figure he is
perceived to be. He penned the words “The end justifies the
means” in his political ‘how-to’ that suggested that rulers
merely rule without moral judgment.
• Boccaccio: Contemporary of Petrarch, known for the
Decameron, a collection of stories that provide a commentary
on the human condition.
• Petrarch: Considered to be the first modern writer. Known for
his sonnets and other works, which evaluated life and the
human condition.
(Eder, Kagan)

9. ENLIGHTENMENT (1650- 1800)
• The enlightenment was a
period of great change in
policies and beliefs
politically, economically,
and socially.
• Philosophes criticized the
status quo.
• They produced many
theories in literature for
the betterment of
humankind.
• A ‘print culture’ emerged, the
volume of printed material
dramatically increased.
• Key areas of discussion during
this period include:
i. Human nature
ii. The relationship between
government and its people
iii. Property
iv. Natural laws and rights
v. Organized religion
(Eder, Kagan)

10. ENLIGHTENMENT WORKS OF NOTE
• Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, Emile, and
Confessions.
• Denis Diderot: Encyclopedie
• Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women
• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
• Voltaire: Candide
• Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
• Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
• Montesquieu: Spirit of the Laws
• John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

11. ENLIGHTENMENT THINKERS
• Rousseau: Developed the idea of the Noble Savage, and
pushed for individualism, as well as individual human rights.
His influence was profound, and his distrust of civilization in
general led to new educational and political practices across
Europe.
• Voltaire: Staunch deist, advocate of human rights and fighter
of injustice. He adamantly fought rigid religion and
governmental abuse of power. He opposed censorship and
was a fierce critic of society.
• Smith: Smith advocated a “Laissez-faire” system of
economics in which the government should stay out of the
day to day economic affairs, allowing for natural regulation in
the free market economy. (Eder, Kagan)

12. ENLIGHTENMENT THINKERS
• Newton: Synthesized Kepler and Galileo’s ideas into his
Laws of Motion, pioneered physics and calculus.
• Locke: Locke believed in the idea of a social contract; that
the government has a duty to its people, and if the
government is not able to do what is required, it should be
altered by the people. Also influential, his term “Tabula Rasa,”
a phrase that represented the idea that people are born a
‘blank slate,’ and over time are altered to become good or
evil depending on their environment. Locke believed that
people achieve equality as a result of their rights, not their
abilities. He believed that humans should have the natural
rights of life, liberty, and property.
(Eder, Kagan)

13. ENLIGHTENMENT THINKERS
• Hobbes: Hobbes believed that, in order for the government
to reach its potential, citizens of the state ought to give up
some rights, in return for protection. He believed in an
absolute monarchy with one state religion, in order for any
country to be strong and unified.
• Wollstonecraft: British writer, thought to be the first feminist.
• Montesquieu: Political conservative, anti-aristocracy, brought
forth the idea for the separation of powers in the
government, his ideas were extremely influential in the
writing of the American constitution later on. His book, Spirit
of the Laws, was possibly the most influential book of the
century.
(Eder, Kagan)

14. IMPORTANT ENLIGHTENMENT QUOTES
• “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” -Rousseau
• “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think; therefore I am”)-Descartes
• “Knowledge is power” - Bacon
• "Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same
species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of
his reason.“- Diderot
• “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your
right to say it.”- Voltaire
• “No one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or
possessions”- Locke
• “When America, the Negro countries…and so forth were
discovered, they were to them [the Europeans], countries
belonging to no one, since they counted the inhabitants as
nothing.”- Kant
(Eder, Kagan)

15. ROMANTICISM (1798 – 1870)
• The term, “Romanticism” was originally used to describe
literature in 17th century Europe that writers saw as
unrealistic, filled with emotions, or over the top in its stylistic
tendencies.
• Many people have come to used the terms “romantic” and
“gothic” interchangeably to describe this type of literature.
Romantic is the broad literary period/ category, gothic
literature is a subset of this movement.
• This movement, centered in Germany, played off of the type
of material often seen in medieval romances.
• Many romantic novels delved into dramatic new subject
matter, often focusing on a character who lived on the edge
of, or outside of normal society.
(Kagan, Hauser)

16. ROMANTICISM
• Romantic-style literature caught on first in Germany and
England. In contrast to the systematic view, used by
Enlightenment thinkers, who saw the universe as a machine;
romanticism saw the world as organic, like a tree full of life.
• This genre disregarded previous rules for form and
technique, giving free reign to the reader’s imagination.
• English writers believed that their writing was enhanced by
following whatever whim their creative impulses felt.
• The movement took longer, however to catch on in France. It
was not until 1816 that a French writer, Henri Beyle, self-
identified as a romantic writer that the style began to take
hold. (Kagan, 643-648)

17. ROMANTICISM
Key ideals and identifying
factors of the romantic literary
movement:
• Emphasis on emotion
• Idealized nature
• Importance of the individual
• Emphasis on imagination
• Dramatic/ bold subject
matter
• Often uses a ‘dark’ aura to
build suspense
Elements of gothic literature:
• Evil characters
• Evil actions or events
• Spooky or lonely setting
• Appearances of ghosts or
spirits
• Mood of horror or terror
• Magical, mysterious, or
supernatural occurrences
• Subjects such as guilt,
punishment and penance.
(Hauser)

18. ROMANTICISM WORKS OF NOTE
• Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto
• Victor Hugo: Les Miserables
• Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Lyrical Ballads
• Lord Byron: Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
• William Wordsworth: The Prelude
• Fredrick Schlegel: Lucinde
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young
Werther, Faust
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

19. REALISM/NATURALISM (1850-1914)
• Gave a look into the dull verities of bourgeois life.
• Used a pseudo-scientific perspective to bring objectivity
to the hypocrisy and brutality of the time.
• Rejected the idealization that was used previously in the
Romantic movement, instead turning to the dark reality
of the middle class way of life.
• Realist writers often broached the subject of the flaws of
society, exhibiting “alcoholism, prostitution, adultery,
labor strife” (Kagan, 807) and other topics that had not
previously been brought to light.
• Writers like Zola and Ibsen worked to uncover the
unpleasant immorality of the middle-class.
(Kagan)

20. REALISM WORKS OF NOTE
• Emile Zola: L’Assommoir
• Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
• Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of
Experimental Science
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
• Charles Dickens: The Adventures of Oliver Twist
• George Bernard Shaw: Mrs. Warren’s Profession
• Two pieces of particular importance were Madame
Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert and A Doll’s House, by
Henrik Ibsen.
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

21. MADAME BOVARY
Madame Bovary, the original ‘realistic’ novel, depicts a
woman who is unsatisfied in her search for love, both
in and outside of her marriage. This novel pours
through the tragic personal details of a promiscuous
bourgeois woman’s life. Ultimately, Madame Bovary
finds that she feels too hopeless to carry on and
chooses to commit suicide. This grim novel embodies
the spirit of the realism movement, free from the
pretense of heroism or civility- diverging completely
from the idealized literature of the past. (Hawthorne)

22. A DOLL’S HOUSE
A Doll’s House tells the tale of Nora Helmer, a seemingly helpless
wife, extremely dependent on her husband Torvald and her domestic
life. In reality, her entire life is a ruse to cover up the fact that she is
doing all kinds of desperate things to repay a loan on which she
forged her father’s signature (without her husband’s knowledge.) As
the plot develops, her façade crumbles. When Torvald realizes that
Nora deceived him for such a long time, he becomes enraged and
calls her unfit to raise his children. When they find out that there will,
in fact, be no consequences for her forgery, he tries to take it all
back. Unfortunately, he had revealed himself to be a selfish,
hypocrite with no regard for her position in the matter. Nora,
unimpressed, leaves Torvald, on a journey to find herself and
become a woman, rather than a ‘doll’ without any illusion of
independence. (Allen, Kashdan)

23. VICTORIAN PERIOD 1832- 1901
• A form of English realism.
• Often critiqued the cruel reality that middle class
members of society had to face.
• The period of English history between the passage
of the first Reform Bill (1832) and the death of
Queen Victoria (reigned 1837–1901).
• This period has a double-edged connotation; it is
remembered for its strict social, political, and sexual
conservatism, but at the same time, it saw prolific
literary activity and significant social reform.
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

24. VICTORIAN WORKS OF NOTE
• William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
• Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island
• Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
• George Eliot: Middlemarch
• Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
• Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
• Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, Great Expectations
• Gerard Manley Hopkins: Pied Beauty
• Anthony Trollope: Chronicles of Barsetshire
• Lord Alfred Tennyson: The Charge of the Light Brigade
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

25. MODERNISM (1870’S – 1965)
• Modernism, like realism, provided critique of morality of the
middle class society.
• Unlike realism, however, Modernism focused on aesthetics,
rather than societal issues.
• Modernism mirrored the upheaval seen in society as a result
of WWI.
• Proponents of Modernism toyed with new forms and styles of
writing, including a technique called stream of
consciousness.
• Developed by Marcel Proust, the ‘stream of consciousness’
style allowed the author to explore all of the facets of their
thought process without any suggested formatting rules.
(Wheeler, Kagan)

26. MODERNISM-STREAM OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
“Novelists have always satisfied our curiosity about
human motivation by revealing the private thoughts of
their characters, but the classic novel contained this
information within an objective description of their
actions and interactions. The avant garde novelists of
the early 20th century believed that they could get
closer to reality not by ‘telling’ but by ‘showing’ how it
is experienced - subjectively.”
-Author David Lodge, regarding the unique literary
technique

27. MODERNISM-AN EXAMPLE OF STREAM
OF CONSCIOUSNESS WRITING
• "Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't. And everybody
is always somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the
city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was
something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of the
things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were
flex and oid or they were duroid (sani) or flexsan (duro), but
everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you
touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber,
only it wasn't quite rubber and you didn't quite touch it but
almost. The wall, which was glass but turned out on being
approached not to be a wall, it was something else, it was an
opening or doorway--and the doorway (through which he saw
himself approaching) turned out to be something else, it was a
wall. And what he had eaten not having agreed with him."
(opening paragraph of "The Door" by E.B. White. The New
Yorker, 1939)

28. MODERNISM WORKS OF NOTE
• Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway
• James Joyce: Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake
• Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
• George Orwell: Animal Farm
• Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Warden
of the Tomb
• William Butler Yeats: The Tower
• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
• Alfred Doblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz
• William Golding: Lord of the Flies
• Albert Camus: The Stranger
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

29. POST-MODERNISM – 1965- PRESENT
• Literary and societal response to the elitism of high
modernism, as well as the horrifying events of WWII.
• Characterized by a strange mix of high and low culture.
• Fragmentation, paradox, and narrators that are difficult to
define are common. The style of writing evokes the absence
of tradition in a modern consumer-driven, technologically
based society.
• Authors began to use a jumble of various ingredients, known
as pastiche, that had not been seen as appropriate for
literature before, in order to create a more complex story,
filled with allusions to events and style of other literary works
that took a certain level of education to recognize or even
begin to appreciate.
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline)

30. POST-MODERNISM WORKS OF NOTE
• Rahld Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books
• Alan Moore: Watchmen
• Dmitry Galkovsky: The Infinite Deadlock
• Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum
• Vladimir Nabokov: Mother Night
• John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• Venedikt Erofeev: Moscow-Petushki
• Walter Abish: How German Is It
• Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
• George Perec: Life: A User’s Manual
• Italo Calvino: If on a winter’s night a traveler
(Wheeler, Lit. Timeline, Rickard)

33. Works Cited
Allen, Rodney. "A Doll's House: A Historical Introduction." Seminar English II. R. J. Reynolds
High School, Winston Salem. Feb.-Mar. 2012. Lecture.
Eder, James M., and Seth A. Roberts. Barron's AP European History. 6th ed. Hauppauge,
NY: Barrons Educational Series, 2012. Print.
Hauser, Kathryn. "The Classic Gothic, Romantic Novel: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." AP
English Literature. Career Center High School, Winston Salem. Jan.-Feb. 2014.
Lecture.
Hawthorne, Melanie. "Madame Bovary." Magill’s Survey Of World Literature, Revised
Edition(2009): 1-2. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
Jalic Inc. Literary Periods and Movements Graphical Timeline. Digital image. Online-
literature.com. The Literature Network, 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.
Kagan, Donald, Steven E. Ozment, and Frank M. Turner. The Western Heritage: Since
1300. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.
Kashdan, Joanne G. "A Doll’s House." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-3. Literary
Reference Center Plus. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
"Literature Timeline." Literature Timeline. Tappan Zee High School English Department, n.d.
Web. 20 Mar. 2014.

34. Works Cited
Lodge, David. "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Best Stream-of-Consciousness
Novels." Theguardian.com/us. The Guardian, 19 Jan. 2009. Web. 22 Mar. 2014.
The Mcclatchy Company. "Paradise Lost" 2011. "The American Enlightenment: Treasures from
the Stanford University Libraries", Palo Alto, CA. EbscoHost. Web. 15 Mar. 2014.
Nordquist, Richard. "Stream of Consciousness." About.com Grammar & Composition.
About.com, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2014.
Rickard, John, Ph.D., M.A., B.A. Literary History Timeline. Bucknell.edu. Bucknell University,
n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.
Viault, Birdsall S. Modern European History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. Print.
Wheeler, L. K., Dr. Periods of Literature. Web.cn.edu. Dr. Kip Wheeler, Carson-Newman
University, n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2014.
White, E. B. "The Door." The New Yorker 25 Mar. 1939: 17. The New Yorker Archive. Web. 22
Mar. 2014.