English Literature: Before England and Old English

• English Literature notes

Before England

• The Celtics existed around 800 BC
• The Romans arrived in 43 AD and founded London, known as Londinium
• The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived in 450 AD and established England
• The Danes arrived in 850 AD
• Alfred the Great ruled from 871-899 in Northern and Eastern England
• The Normans arrived in 1066 AD
• William the Conqueror led the Norman invasion
• The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Battle of Hastings events

The Old English Period (500-1066)

• Old English literature employed alliteration - consonant rhyme
• Germanic languages influenced Old English
• End rhyme was also present
• Romance languages had an impact
• The poem Beowulf is an epic poem and the most important Old English poem
• The Beowulf manuscript dates to around 1000

The Middle English Period (1066-1485)

• The Hundred Years' War took place from 1337-1453
• The War of the Roses (civil war) occurred from 1455-1485
• A new form of English emerged around 1300 AD, known as Middle English
• Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) was the significant Middle English author
• Chaucer's Canterbury Tales uses a frame story
• Biblical themes were common
• The themes included: mystery and morality and miracle plays

The Renaissance (1485-1660)

• Renaissance means rebirth
• "Memento mori" (theocentric) contrasted with "carpe diem" (humanistic)
• William Caxton introduced the printing press in 1476
• Thomas More (1478-1535) wrote Utopia ("Nowhere")

Lyrical Poetry (Early 16th Century)

• Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) invented the sonnet (14 lines)
• Prominent sonneteers included Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser
• Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was an Elizabethan dramatist
• Marlowe's works include "The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus" (1592), "Tamburlaine the Great" and "The Jew of Malta"
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616) lived during the Elizabethan and Jacobean Age
• Blank verse was used
• Shakespeare wrote works such as
  • Comedies: "Merchant of Venice", "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
  • History Plays: "Richard 2", "Henry 4"
  • Tragedies: "Romeo and Juliet", "Julius Caesar", "Hamlet", "Othello", "Macbeth", "King Lear."
• Ben Jonson (1572-1637) works include "Volpone, or the Foxe" (1605), a satire
• John Webster (1580-1634) wrote "The Duchess of Malfi" (1614)
• Poetry during this time featured the English sonnet (Shakespearean sonnet)

The Late Renaissance Literature

• Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) wrote "The Fairie Queen" and "Amoretti"
• John Donne (1572-1631) was a poet
• The King James Bible was published in 1611
• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote "Leviathan" (1651)
• John Milton (1608-1674) wrote "Aeropagitica" (1644)
• Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) wrote "To His Coy Mistress", a "Carpe diem poem"

The Restoration and Age of Reason (1660-1789)

• The Industrial Revolution occurred during this period
• John Milton (1608-1674) wrote "Paradise Lost", an epic poem over 10,000 lines
• John Bunyan (1628-1688) wrote "The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come"
• Satire was a prominent literary form
• Alexander Pope (1688-1744) employed the heroic couplet
• Pope's works include "An Essay on Criticism" (1711), "The Rape of the Lock" (1712), and "The Dunciad" (1728)
• Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) wrote "Gulliver's Travels"
• Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) wrote "Robinson Crusoe" (1719)
• Henry Fielding (1707-1754) wrote "Joseph Andrews"

The Romantic Period (1789-1830)

• The French Revolution occurred in 1789
• Literature valued beauty and nature
• Idealized elements included far away, exotic cultures, children and supernatural
• William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) co-authored "Lyrical Ballads"
• Wordsworth's works include "Poems in Two Volumes" and "The Prelude"
• Second-generation romantic poets included George, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821)
• Byron's works include "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1812-1818) and "Don Juan" (1819-1824)
• Shelley's works include "Ode to the West Wind", "Ozymandias", and "Elegy" (500 lines)
• Keats wrote 3 famous odes: "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "To Autumn" as well as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"
• The novel emerged in the age of Romanticism
• Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote "Ivanhoe" (1819)
• Jane Austen (1775-1817) wrote "Sense and Sensibility" (1811), "Emma" (1816), "Persuasion" (1818), and "Pride and Prejudice" (1813)

The Victorian Age (1830-1914)

• Queen Victoria reigned from 1837-1901 and the era was known as the 'Empire on which the sun never set'
• Darwin wrote "On the Origin of Species" (1859
• Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) wrote "Ulysses" and "In Memoriam A.H.H"
• Robert Browning (1812-1889) wrote "My Last Duchess"
• Charles Dickens (1812-1870) authored:
  • "Oliver Twist" (1837-1839)
  • "A Christmas Carol" (1843)
  • "David Copperfield" (1849-1850)
  • "Great Expectations" (1860-1861)
• The Brontë Sisters: Charlotte (1816-1855) had 4 novels
  • Charlotte wrote "Jane Eyre" (1847)
  • Emily (1818-1848) set her works, like "Wuthering Heights" (1847), against the Yorkshire Moors backdrop
• Anne (1820-1849) was less famous than her sisters and wrote "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848)
• George Eliot (1819-1880) wrote "Adam Bede" (1859), "The Mill on the Floss", "Silas Marner" (1861), and "Middlemarch" (1871)
• Henry James (1843-1916) wrote "The Portrait of a Lady" (1881)
• Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) wrote "Heart of Darkness" (1899), "Lord Jim" (1900), "Nostromo" (1904), and "Victory" (1915)
• Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) created "Sherlock Holmes" and "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1902)
• H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was an author