English Lit Context

Middle English 1066-1485.

Renaissance Begins 1485-

• Mystery/Morality Plays.
• Tales
• Epic prose
• Chivalric Romance (king Arthur)
• Influence of printing press 1474.
• Religious devotion
• Stock epithets 
• illiterate population able to hear and see literature
• oral tradition
• church claimed women should be 'subservient to their husbands'
• medieval/gothic

Key Writers:

• Chaucer

Henry VII 1509-1547

Elizabeth I (Elizabethan) 1558-1603.

Renaissance 1485-1660

• World view shifts from religion to afterlife.
• development of human potential
• unrequited,constant,timeless,courtly,subject to change love all represented.
• printing press stabilises English
• commoners welcomed at play productions.
• Drama becomes important - London playhouses
• masque and spectacle popular
• courtly love in poetry
• moarchs themselves were writers
• tragedies,comedies, sonnets,classical verse, allegorical poetry.

Key Authors:

• Edmund Spenser
• Sir Phillip Sidney
• Shakespeare

James I (Jacobean) 1603-25

Charles I (Caroline) 1625-49

Commonwealth 1649-60 (Civil War)

Charles II (Restoration) 1660-85

Renaissance 1485-1660

Neoclassical Period 1660-1798

• Metaphysical Poetry
• restoration drama
• social comedy
• Charles I executed in 1649
• Puritans close theatres 1649-60
• 1660- theatres reopened under Charles II
• influence of court on drama/poetry/prose
• factories start popping up/demise of traditional village life.
• 50% males literate

Key Authors:

• Shakespeare
• John Donne
• Robert Herrick
• Ben Jonson

Neoclassical 1660-1798

Romantic 1798-

Regency (Anne, George I, George II) 1700-60

Augustan (Englightenment) George III 1760-1820

• New Genre - Novel (Defoe)
• Biting satire - mocking those in power
• Picaresque, confessionals and satirical novels all well established by the end of the century.
• Romantic novels created for female audience
• Black-Precursor of the Romantic movement
• Epistolary novels
• Bawdy verse.

Key Authors:

• Wordsworth
• Fielding
• Defoe
• Congreve
• Sheridan
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Alexander Pope

Romantic 1820-37

Victorian/Industrial Revolution (Victoria) 1837-1901

• Passion and imagination
• influence of gothic and middle ages
• importance of rebellion
• desire for personal freedom
• society was the cause of evil, not people
• children = hopeless victims of poverty and exploitation
• themes of duty,nationalism and trade
• family values
• darwinism
• serialisation
• drama - comedy of manners
• novel was mass produced
• class and gender divide

Key Authors:

• Jane Austen
• Leo Tolstoy
• Cristina Rossetti
• Charles Dickens
• Oscar Wilde
• Thomas Hardy
• Lord Byron
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Modernism 1910-52

Post Modernism 1952- (Elizabeth II)

Edwardian (Edward VII) 1901-10

George V 1910-36

George VI 1936-52

• War poetry
• WW1=questioning of life in all aspects
• preoccupation with social identity
• freudian psychology
• stream of consciousness
• traditional linear mocked
• free verse poetry
• parallelism, binary opposition
• deliberate irony
• Kitchen sink dramas (realism)
• drama of the absurd

Key Authors:

• Yeats
• Fitzgerald
• Shaffer
• Tenessee Williams
• Elizabeth Jennings
• McAuley
• Fuller
• Carol Anne Duffy
• Ian McEwan
• Vernon Scannell