-
Period: 500 to Dec 31, 1100
Old English (Anglo Saxon)
refers to the literature produced from the invasion of Celtic England by Germanic tribes in the first half of the fifth century to the conquest of England in 1066 by William the Conqueror.
During the Old English Period, written literature began to develop from oral tradition, and in the eighth century poetry written in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon (also known as Old English) appeared.
Received Latin, Celtic, and Norse influence -
Feb 13, 700
Beowulf
an Old English epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines. It is possibly one of the oldest surviving long poems in Old English and is commonly cited as one of the most important works of Old English literature. -
Mar 24, 750
Old English Poetry
Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the Christian. With a few exceptions, almost all Old English poets are anonymous. -
May 12, 1020
Charter of Cnut
This is a proclamation from King Cnut the Great to his earl Thorkell the Tall and the English people written in AD 1020. Unlike the previous two examples, this text is prose rather than poetry. -
Period: Jan 1, 1100 to Dec 31, 1400
Middle English
Middle English describes dialects of English in the history of the English language between the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the three centuries between the late 12th and the late 15th century -
Feb 19, 1200
Grammar
With its simplified case-ending system, the grammar of Middle English is much closer to that of modern English than that of Old English. Compared with other Germanic languages, it is probably the most similar to that of modern West Frisian, one of English's closest relatives. -
Apr 2, 1209
Cambridge University
The University of Cambridge is established -
Mar 25, 1390
Confessio Amantis
("The Lover's Confession") is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower, which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems. In genre it is usually considered a poem of consolation. -
Apr 25, 1399
Richard II of England
The Late Middle English period was a time of upheaval in England. After the deposition of Richard II of England in 1399, the House of Plantagenet split into the House of Lancaster and the House of York, whose antagonism culminated in the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487). Stability came only gradually with the Tudor dynasty under Henry VII. -
Period: Jan 1, 1400 to
The Renaissance
The Renaissance is a period from the 14th to the 17th century, considered the bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern history. It started as a cultural movement in Italy in the Late Medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe. -
Apr 2, 1405
Science
The rediscovery of ancient texts and the invention of printing democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of ideas. In the first period of Italian Renaissance, humanists favoured the study of humanities over natural philosophy or applied mathematics. And their reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe. -
Feb 25, 1450
Humanism
Humanism is the resurgent study of classical antiquity, at first in Italy, and then spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. The terms Renaissance (rinascimento "rebirth") for this movement, and "humanist" (whence modern humanism; also Renaissance humanism to distinguish it from later developments grouped as humanism) are contemporary to that period. -
Apr 25, 1455
Art
The Renaissance marks the period of European history at the close of the Middle Ages and the rise of the Modern world. It represents a cultural rebirth from the 14th through the middle of the 17th centuries. -
Mar 25, 1503
Mona LIsa by Leonardo da Vinci
The Mona LIsa, a half-length portrait of a woman by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, which has been acclaimed as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied. The ambiguity of the subject's expression, which is frequently described as enigmatic, the monumentality of the composition, the subtle modeling of forms and the atmospheric illusionism were novel qualities that have contributed to the continuing fascination and study of the work. -
Period: to
Neo-Classicism
Neoclassicism is the movement that shaped the thought, minds, and civic ideals of Americans for 150 years. -
Painting and printmaking
It is hard to recapture the radical and exciting nature of early neo-classical painting for contemporary audiences; it now strikes even those writers favourably inclined to it as "insipid" and "almost entirely uninteresting to us"—some of Kenneth Clark's comments on Anton Raphael Mengs' ambitious Parnassus at the Villa Albani, by the artist who his friend Winckelmann described as "the greatest artist of his own, and perhaps of later times". -
Sculptures
If Neoclassical painting suffered from a lack of ancient models, Neoclassical sculpture tended to suffer from an excess of them, although examples of actual Greek sculpture of the "classical period" beginning in about 500 BC were then very few; the most highly regarded works were mostly Roman copies.The leading Neoclassical sculptors enjoyed huge reputations in their own day, but are now less regarded, with the exception of Jean-Antoine Houdon, whose work was mainly portraits. -
Architecture and the decorative arts
Neoclassicism first gained influence in England and France, through a generation of French art students trained in Rome and influenced by the writings of Winckelmann, and it was quickly adopted by progressive circles in other countries such as Sweden and Russia. -
Period: to
Romanticism
Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. -
Neoclassicism and fashion
In fashion, Neoclassicism influenced the much greater simplicity of women's dresses, and the long-lasting fashion for white, from well before the French Revolution, but it was not until after it that thorough-going attempts to imitate ancient styles became fashionable in France, at least for women. Classical costumes had long been worn by fashionable ladies posing "as" some figure from Greek or Roman myth in a portrait (in particular there was a rash of such portraits of the young "model" Emma, -
The Sorrows of Young Werther
The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism. -
Frankenstein
is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley about the young student of science Victor Frankenstein, who creates a grotesque but sentient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France in 1823. -
Influence of European Romanticism on American writers
The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with corruption. -
Period: to
Victorian
Within the fields of social history and literature, Victorianism refers to the study of late-Victorian attitudes and culture with a focus on the highly moralistic, straitlaced language and behaviour of Victorian morality. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period. The later half of the Victorian age roughly coincided with the first portion of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe and the Gilded Age of the United States. -
Battle Of The Styles
The Battle of the Styles is a term used to refer to the conflict between supporters of the Gothic style and the Classical style in architecture. In Britain this led to public debates between Decimus Burton and Augustus Pugin. In France it led to controversy over the work of Viollet-le-Duc. The "battle" arose from the Gothic revival of the late 18th Century, when the supremacy of Classicism as the embodiment of taste was challenged. -
Romantic visual arts
In the visual arts, Romanticism first showed itself in landscape painting, where from as early as the 1760s British artists began to turn to wilder landscapes and storms, and Gothic architecture, even if they had to make do with Wales as a setting. -
A Tale Of Two Cities
a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralised by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same period. It follows the lives of several characters through these -
Entertainment
The Victorian era marked the golden age of the British circus. Astley's Amphitheatre in Lambeth, London, featuring equestrian acts in a 42-foot wide circus ring, was the epicentre of the 19th century circus. -
Period: to
Modern Period
a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, musiv literature and design which emerged in the decades before 1914. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled agaisnt late 19th century academic and historicist traditions, and embraced the new economic , social, and political aspects, of the emerging modern world -
James Joyce
an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. -
World War 1
A global war centered in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, paving the way for major political changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved. -
Graham Greene
an English novelist and author regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[1][2] Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene had acquired a reputation early in his own lifetime as a great writer, both of serious Catholic novels and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them); however, even though shortlisted in 1967, he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. -
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the 1930s. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations; however, in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. -
Ernest Hemingway
was an American author and journalist whose economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. -
Period: to
Post Modern
literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator; and often is (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature. -
Theater of The Absurd
a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s, as well as one for the style of theatre which has evolved from their work. Their work expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down, in fact alerting their audiences to pursue the opposite. -
Irony, playfulness, black humor
Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humor and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. -
Magic realism
Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality. -
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general." -
Period: to
Contemporary
Contemporary history describes the period timeframe that closely connected to the present day; it is a certain perspective of modern history. The term "contemporary history" has been in use at least since the early 19th century. -
Information Age
The Information Age or Information Era, also commonly known as the Age of the Computer, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. -
Bombinvg Of the Twin Towers
Terrorists bombed these towers in 2001 and caused a nationwide debate on terrorism -
The Lord's Prayer
This text of the Lord's Prayer is presented in the standardised West Saxon literary dialect, with added macrons for vowel length, markings for probable palatalised consonants, modern punctuation, and the replacement of the letter wynn with w.
