Periods and Characteristics

Anglo-Saxon Period: 450-1066

1. Characteristics
• Oral Poetry
• Heroic code
• Comitatus Bond
• Fatalism
• The beginning of Christianity
2. Works
• [Core] Beowulf/Deor/The Dream of the Rood/ The Wanderer
  *Norman Conquest

Medieval Period: 1066-1485 (Middle Age/Dark Age)

1. Characteristics
• Chivalric code (*Heroic code vs Chivalric code)
• Courtly love
• Christianity
2. Works
• [Core] Sir Gawain and the Green Knight/Canterbury Tales 

Renaissance; 1500-1660

1. Characteristics
• Magic
• Reformation (1517 Martin Luthur defends his theses and started the reformation): Question of Church/religion
• Discovery of the world and man
• Renaissance woman: on pedestal, worshiped
2. Works
• [Core] An Apology for Poetry/Hamlet/Macbeth/The Merchant of Venice

Restoration: 1660-1688
Charles II comes back and reclaimed the crown of England. Charles I was executed and Cromwell (Puritan, very conservative) ruled England.

1. Characteristics
• Faith vs Rejection of Puritanism
• Comedy of Manners (Loosen part of morality)
• The coming back of theaters (women could play a part in dramas)
• Religious allegories and writing.
2. Works
• [Core] Paradise Lost 

 Long Eighteenth Century: 1688-1798
(Classical Age/Augustan Age/ Age of Reason)

1. Characteristics
• Satire
• Reveal Hypocrisy of upper-class
• Classicism
• Rebel against the exaggerated and fantastic style of writing, follow exact rules
• Age of reason
• Realism/Precision
• The rise of novels
• The age of Dryden-The age of Pope-The age of Johnson
• https://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/eighteenth-century-literature/
2. Works
• [Core] The Rape of the Lock/Joseph Andrews 

Romantic Period: 1798-1832:

1. Characteristics:
• Nature, sublime (divine revelation)
• Supernatural
• Focus on individual
• Imagination
• Emotion triumphs reason
• Focus on rural and real people
• The beginning of feminism
• Gothic
• Rebellion
• Revolution
2. Works
• [Core] Wordsworth (4 works)/Pride and Prejudice 

Victorian Period: 1832-1901

1. Characteristics
• long novels, thickly plotted, huge cast of characters
• realistic
• Often portraying urban life
• industrial revolution happening
• very descriptive
• emotionally expressed
• crash between traditional life and modern life
2. Works
• [Core] Wurthering Heights/Little Dorrit/In Memoriam 

Modern Period: 1890-1939

1. Characteristics:
• Birth of narrator who can't be trusted (a combination of fiction and reality)
• Multiple subjectives
• Form reflects content
• Metanarrative
• Making it difficult
• Fragmentation
• Multidimensional
• Self-referrential
• Return of the repressed-woman, working class, religious, ethnic, and sexual perspectives
• Psychological depth and social disintegration/ambiguities: stream of consciousness
• Alienation: readers are no longer on the sidelines but experience the experiences of the protagonist
• Rebellion: High literature versus low literature
2. Works
• [Core] Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man/ To the Lighthouse/WWI 

Post Modern/Contemporary Period: 1939-Present

1. Characteristics
• Fragmentation/alienation
• Intertextuality
• Metafiction
• Britishness
• Looking Back
• Gender Roles
• Form reflects content
• Return of the repressed
2. Works
• [Core] Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead/White Teeth