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                              B.A English and a post graduate (M.A) student of English Literature

Literature is a precious treasure of every nation. No body can deny that literature and culture are closely integrated and there are some intrinsic and indispensable hybrids between these two prominent parameters of human civilization. In fact we can claim that the foundations and blazing points for all social and reformist movements have sprang out from literature and aware literary persons. This means that in every movement, literature has had an undeniable influence. As much as it concerned to literature and the effects on society and human being, it is not possible to explain it in such a short time and lack of enough room.

However, for the convenience of this paper, I have tried to present some subtitles and various periods of English literature in Chronological order which pave the path for every newcomer into era of English literature.

Before entering into the main topic, it sounds necessary to mention that this is not a

tutorial, in the sense of a close reading of any text. And it is not very interesting to read from start to finish. I hope, rather, that it will be used as a point of reference or way in to literature for beginners. You will soon see if it is not for you.

Periods of English Literature: For convenience of discussion, historians divide the continuity of English Literature into segments of time, which are called “periods”. The exact numbers, dates, and names of these periods vary, but the list below conforms to widespread practice. The list is followed by a brief comment on each period in chronological order:

450-1066           Old English (or Anglo –Saxon) period

1066-1500         Middle English Period

1500-1660         The Renaissance

1558-1603         Elizabethan Age

1603-1625         Jacobean Age

1625-1649         Caroline Age

1649-1660         Commonwealth Period (or Puritan Interregnum)

1660-1785         The Neoclassical Period

1660-1700         The Restoration

1700-1745         The Augustan Age(or Age of Pope

1745-1785         The Age of Sensibility (or Age of Johnson)

1785-1830         The Romantic Period

1832-1901         The Victorian Period

1848-1860         The Pre-Raphaelites

1880-1901         Aestheticism and Decadence

1901-1914         The Edwardian Period

1910-1936         The Georgian Period

1914     The Modern Period

1945     Postmodernism

Old English Period, or the Anglo-Saxon period, extended from the invasion of the Celtic England by Germanic by tribes (the angles, Saxon, and Jutes) in the first half of the fifth century to the conquest of England in 1066 by the Norman French under the leadership of William the Conqueror. Only after they had been converted to Christianity in the seventh century did the Anglo-Saxon, whose earlier literature had been oral, begin to develop a written literature .a high level of culture and learning was soon achieved in variouse Monasteries; the eighth century churchmen Bede and Alcuin were major scholars who wrote in Latin, the standard language of international scholarship. The poetry written in vernacular (colloquial speech) Anglo-Saxon, known also as old English, included Beowulf (eighth century), the greatest of Germanic Epic poems, and such lyric laments as “the wanderer”, “the seafarer” all of which, though composed by Christian writers, reflect the conditions of life in the pagan past. Caedmon and Cynewwulf were poets who wrote on biblical and religious themes, and there survive a number of old English Lives of Saints, sermons, and paraphrases of books of the Bible. Alfred the great, a west Saxon King (871-99)who for a time united all the kingdoms of southern England against a new wave of Germanic invaders, the Vikings, was no less important as a patron of literature than as a warrior. he himself translated into old English variouse books of Latin prose, supervised translations by other hands, and instituted the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ,a continuous record ,year by year, of important events in England.

To show the difficulty of old English language and the different structures and words ,I have chosen a pathetic text from Beowulf  as follow :

Alegdon tha tomiddes   maerne theoden

Haeleth hiofende          halfor leofine

Ongunnon  tha     on beorge    bael-fyra maest

Wigend weccan     wudu-rec astah

Sweart ofer swiothole swogende  leg

Wope bewunden.

New format (translated):

The sorrowing soldiers then laid the glorious prince, their dead lord, in the middle. Then on the hill the war-men began to light the greatest of funeral fires. The wood-smoke rose black above the flames, the noisy fire, mixed with sorrowful cries. 

So it is evident that the old language can not be read now except by those who have made a special study of it.

See for more reference: Edward Albert, History of English literature (1979); C.L.Wrenn, A study of old English Literature (1966).

Middle English Period: The four and half centuries between the Norman Conquest in 1066,which effected radical changes in the language, life, and culture of England, and about 1500,when the standard literary language (deriving from the dialect of London area) had become recognizably “modern English”-that is similar to the language we speak and write today.

The span from 1100 to 1350 is sometimes discriminated as the Anglo-Norman Period, because the non-Latin literature of that time was written mainly in Anglo-Norman, the French dialect spoken by the invaders who had established themselves as the ruling class of England. When the native vernacular, descended from Anglo-Saxon and known as “middle English” came into general literary use, it was at first mainly the vehicle for religious and homiletic writings. the first great age of primarily secular literature was the second half of the fourteenth century –the age of Chaucer and John Gower  and of the anonymous master who wrote four major poems in complex alliterative meter, including the elegy pearl, and Sir Gawain and the great knight. this last work is the most accomplished of the English Chivalric romances. The outstanding poets of the fifteenth century were the Scottish Chaucerian’s, who included King James 1of Scotland and Robert Henryson. The fifteenth century was more important for popular literature than for the artful literature addressed to the upper classes: it was the age of many excellent songs, secular and religious, and folk ballades as well as the flowering time of the medieval drama, the miracle and morality plays which were written and produced for the general public.

See W.L.Renwick and Horton, the beginnings of English Literature (1952); Edward Albert, History of English literature (1979).

The Renaissance (rebirth), 1500-1660; Renaissance is the name commonly applied to the period of European history following the middle ages; it is usually said to have begun in Italy in the late fourteenth century and to have continued, both in Italy and other countries of Western Europe, through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries .in this period the European arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and literature reached an eminence not exceeded in any age. The development came late to England in the sixteenth century, and did not have its flowering until the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; so some times John Milton (1608-74) is described as the last great Renaissance poet.

Many attempts have been made to define “the Renaissance” in a brief assertion, as though a single essence underlay the complex features of the intellectual and cultural life of numerous countries over several hundred years. it has for example, been described as the birth of the modern world out of the ashes of the dark ages; as the discovery of the world and the discovery of man; and as the era of untrammeled individualism in life, thought, religion, and art.

During the span of time called  “the Renaissance” it is possible to identify a number of events and discoveries which beginning approximately in the fifteenth century, clearly effected radical and distinctive changes in the beliefs, productions and manner of life of many people especially in the upper and intellectual classes.

All these occurrences may be regarded as putting a strain on the relatively closed and stable world of great civilization of the later middle Ages, when most of the essential and permanent truth about God, man, and the universe were considered to be adequately known. The full impact of many developments in the Renaissance did not make itself felt until the Enlightment in the later Seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, but the fact that they occurred in this period indicates the vitality, the audacity, and the restless curiosity of many men of the era, whether scholars, thinkers, artists or adventurers. Prominent among these developments were:

1)         The new learning. Renaissance scholars of the classic, called humanists, revived the knowledge of the Greek, discovered and disseminated a great number of Greek manuscripts and added considerably to the number of Roman authors and works which had been known to the Middle ages.  The result was to open out the sense of the vastness of the historical past, as well as to enlarge immensely the stock of ideas, materials, literary forms and styles available to Renaissance writers. In the mid-fifteenth century the invention of printing on paper made books for the first time inexpensive and plentiful and floods of publications, ancient and modern, poured from the presses of Europe to satisfy the demands of the expanding population who had learned to read.

2)         The new religion. The Reformation led by Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a successful heresy struck at the very foundations of the institutionalism of the Roman Catholic Church. This early Protestantism was grounded on each individual’s inner experience of spiritual struggle and salvation. Faith (based on the word of the bible) was alone thought competent to save, and salvation itself was regarded as a direct transaction with God in theater of the individual soul, without the necessity of intermediation by Church, priest  or sacrament .at this time ,Protestantism was born as the religion of objection and opposition of Renaissance individualism  in northern Europe. Later on, John Calvin and his Puritan followers conducted this school.   

3)         The new world. In 1492 Christopher Columbus, acting on the persisting and widespread belief in the old Greek idea that the world is a globe, sailed west to find a new commercial route to the East, only to be frustrated by the unexpected barrier of a new continent. The succeeding explorations of this continent and its native populations, and its settlement by Europeans, gave new materials to the literary imagination. More important for English literature, however, was the fact that Economic exploitation of the new world-often cruel and devastating to the native people put England at the center of the chief trade routes and so helped established the commercial prosperity that in England as in Italy earlier was necessary though not sufficient condition for the development of a vigorous intellectual and artistic life.

4)         The new cosmos. The cosmos of medieval astronomy and theology was Ptolemic (that is, based on the astronomy of Ptolemy, second century) and pictured a stationary earth around which rotated the successive spheres of the moon, the variouse planets, and then the fixed stars. Heaven or the Empyrean was thought to be situated above the spheres and Hell to be situated either at the center 0f the earth (as in Dante’s inferno) or els below the system of the spheres (as in John Milton’s Paradise lost) .in 1543 Copernicus published his new hypothesis concerning the system of the universe; this gave a much simpler and more coherent explanation of accumulating observations of the actual movements of the heavenly bodies which had led to ever greater complications of the Ptolemaic world picture. the Copernican theory proposed a system in which the center is the sun, no the earth, and in which the earth is not stationary ,but only planet among many planets all of which revolve around the sun. 

Refer to Edward Albert, History of English literature (1979); J.Burckhardt, civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

I hope that this will be a preliminary step for those who are interested to step into the era of English Literature and surely they do not stop themselves to this short glance but rather they look forward to enriching their knowledge. In fact, the need for boosting the knowledge in the field of Literature especially over vehemently in English should be felt among scholars and students who have an adventurous spirit.