INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE

“PERIOD OF ENGLISH LITERATURE”

NAME : MARINI DONDO
CLASS : D

These are 8 periods of English Literature

1. Beowulf
Beowulf is an Old English epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines.
It is possibly the oldest surviving long poem in Old English and is commonly cited as
one of the most important works of Old English literature. It was written in England
some time between the 8th and the early 11th century. The author was an anonymous
Anglo-Saxon poet, referred to by scholars as the “Beowulf poet.”
The poem is set in Scandinavia. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid
of Hroðgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been under attack
by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel’s mother attacks
the hall and is then also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland
(Götaland in modern Sweden) and later becomes king of the Geats. After a period of
fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle.
After his death, his attendants bury him in a tumulus, a burial mound, in Geatland.
2. William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare, Shakespeare also spelled Shakspere, byname Bard of
Avon or Swan of Avon, (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire, England—died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon), English poet,
dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet and considered by many to
be the greatest dramatist of all time.
Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature. Other poets, such
as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, have
transcended national barriers, but no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of
Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small
repertory theatre, are now performed and read more often and in more countries than
ever before. The prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben
Jonson, that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time,” has been fulfilled.
3. Restoration
Restoration literature is the English literature written during the historical period
commonly referred to as the English Restoration (1660–1689), which corresponds to
the last years of Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the
term is used to denote roughly homogenous styles of literature that center on a
celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that
includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's
Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom
of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of
the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the
hysterical attacks on theaters from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary
criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news become a
commodity, the essay develop into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual
criticism.
4. The Romantic Period
As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the
18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a
 little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the
great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August
Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction
established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and the
“mechanical” character of Classicism.
5. Transcendental Movement
Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political
movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller,
Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer
Peabody, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the
Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the
transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were
critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that
each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe” (O, 3).
Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their
writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the
social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an
increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.
6. Literary Realism
Literary realism is a literary movement that represents reality by portraying mundane,
everyday experiences as they are in real life. It depicts familiar people, places, and
stories, primarily about the middle and lower classes of society. Literary realism seeks
to tell a story as truthfully as possible instead of dramatizing or romanticizing it.
7. Victorian Literature
Victorian literature is the body of poetry, fiction, essays, and letters produced during
the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) and during the era which bears her name. It
forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the
modernist literature of the twentieth century. The novel become the leading form of
literature in English. The works by pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and
Walter Scott had perfected both closely observed social satire and historical fiction.
Serialized popular novels won unprecedented readership and led to increasing artistic
sophistication. The nineteenth century is often regarded as a high point in European
literature and Victorian literature, including the works of Emily and Charlotte
Brontë), Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie
Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard
Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William
Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Oscar Wilde remain widely popular
and part of the core curricula in most universities and secondary schools.
8. Modernism
The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the
beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period
was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and
interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where
in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one
sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the
Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World
War One.