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Occurred in the Anglo-Saxon period. started in 410 AD. At that time the Romans withdrew from Britain. there were the Germans and Scandinavians. This period goes until the year 1066.
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Oral traditions of Old and Middle English: The most popular is the epic poem "Beowulf." There are numerous written versions of the work, it was originally a spoken poem passed through generations of early inhabitants of England called Anglo-Saxons. The most surprising thing about these early British works is their graphic content and crude sexual content.
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The Venerable Bede, in his monastery at Jarrow, completes his history of the English church and people
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Beowulf, the first great work of Germanic literature, mingles the legends of Scandinavia with the experience in England of Angles and Saxons
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The material of the Eddas, taking shape in Iceland, derives from earlier sources in Norway, Britain and Burgundy.
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In the year 1066 the French agreed with the Anglo-Saxon to produce medium English (language of Geoffrey Chaucer).
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Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times, later provides humanists with the name Dunsman or dunce
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William of Ockham advocates paring down arguments to their essentials, an approach later known as Ockham's Razor.
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The courtly poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells of a mysterious visitor to the round table of King Arthur
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Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy
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Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death
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Thomas Malory, in gaol somewhere in England, compiles Morte d'Arthur – an English account of the French tales of King Arthur
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Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance in the direction of Christian humanism
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William Tyndale studies in the university at Wittenberg and plans to translate the Bible into English
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The first version of the English prayer book, or Book of Common Prayer, is published with text by Thomas Cranmer
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Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year, with Marlowe the older by two months
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William Shakespeare's plays and poems figure prominently. His works are divided into comedies, tragedies and stories.
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Shakespeare's central character in Hamlet expresses both the ideals of the Renaissance and the disillusion of a less confident age.
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Shakespeare's last completed play, The Tempest, is performed.
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Middle English gave way to modern English during the Middle Ages, and Britain produced many great authors during the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Lasted from the mid-1800s to the beginning of the twentieth century, includes the love poems of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Lord Alfred Tennyson's sweeping saga of Camelot entitled "Idylls of the King," and the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure stories and novels, including his famous "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
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Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock introduces a delicate vein of mock-heroic in English poetry
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Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language
This period produced authors who wrote about life, love and nature. The most relevant authors are John Keats (1795- 1821), William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. -
Lasted from the mid-1800s to the beginning of the twentieth century, includes the love poems of Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Lord Alfred Tennyson's sweeping saga of Camelot entitled "Idylls of the King," and the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure stories and novels, including his famous "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
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English poet John Keats publishes Ode to a Nightingale, inspired by the bird's song in his Hampstead garden English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes Ode to the West Wind, written mainly in a wood near Florence
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The 19th century is considered the great age of the novel. The turn of the 20th century saw the rise of modernism, a movement characterized by stylistic experimentation and the questioning of traditional values.
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University College London began teaching in 1828 and included on its staff Britain’s first ‘Professor of English Language and Literature’. The political establishment responded by founding a rival institution, King’s College London, the following year; by 1835 it had a professor of English Literature and History too.
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In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany
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Sapper's patriotic hero makes his first appearance, taking on the villainous Carl Peterson in Bull-dog Drummond One of the most significant developments in English Studies in the 1920s and 1930s was a response to these changes. They noticed the emergence of mass society.
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English author Nancy Mitford has her first success with the novel The Pursuit of Love It was in the 1960s that a shift in the nature of literary studies began remains the context in which English Literature is taught in universities today.
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English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London
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English author Julian Barnes publishes a multi-faceted literary novel, Flaubert's Parrot
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British Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah publishes his second collection as The Dread Affair
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English poets John Fuller and James Fenton collaborate in a volume of satirical poems, Partingtime Hall.
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Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark
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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials.
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Oscar Wao‘ – Junot Díaz. Edward P. Jones. Hilary Mantel. ‘Gilead – Marilynne Robinson. Jonathan Franzen. Michael Chabon. ‘A visit from the goon squad‘ – Jennifer Egan. ‘Billy Lynn’s long halftime walk‘ – Ben Fountain. Ian McEwan. ‘Middlesex‘ – Jeffrey Eugenides.
