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450 - 1066
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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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1066 - 1500
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Duns Scotus, known as the Subtle Doctor in medieval times.
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Ockham's Razor
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A narrator who calls himself Will, Poem of Piers Plowman.
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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.
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1500 - 1660
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Erasmus and Thomas More take the northern Renaissance.
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William Tyndale plans to translate the Bible into English.
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The first version of the English prayer book is published with text by Thomas Cranmer.
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Marlowe and Shakespeare are born in the same year.
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The Book of Common Prayer and the New Testament are published in Welsh, to be followed by the complete Bible in 1588.
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The 18-year-old William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway.
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Marlowe's first play, Tamburlaine the Great.
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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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William Shakespeare dies at New Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is buried in Holy Trinity Church.
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John Heminge and Henry Condell publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First Folio.
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1653 - 1660
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1660 - 1700
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Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko makes an early protest against the inhumanity of the African slave trade.
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1700 - 1798
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Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel.
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Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language.
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Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language.
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English author Mary Wollstonecraft publishes "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman".
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1798 - 1837
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Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication.
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1837 - 1901
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London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms.
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Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species.
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Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas.
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English author Bram Stoker publishes Dracula, his gothic tale of vampirism in Transylvania.
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1901 - 1940
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Lytton Strachey fails to show conventional respect to four famous Victorians in his influential volume of short biographies entitled Eminent Victorians.
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Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness is the first to deal openly with a lesbian subject.
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US poet Archibald MacLeish publishes a narrative epic, Conquistador, about the conquest of Mexico.
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1940 - 2000
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Penguin Books are prosecuted for obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and are acquitted.
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English dramatist Caryl Churchill's first play, Owners, is produced in London.
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Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children uses the moment of India's independence to launch an adventure in magic realism.
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Talking Heads, a series of dramatic monologues by English author Alan Bennett, is broadcast on British TV.
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English poet Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats deals openly with AIDS.
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A schoolboy wizard performs his first tricks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
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The Amber Spyglass completes Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials.
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PRESENT LITERATURE 2000 - 2020
