ENGLISH, AMERICAN AND POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Literature in contexts  Generic or genre context  Poetry, drama, novel  Epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy, and satire  They tell us what sort of text we are dealing with  Historical context  Every work has a historical context  It belongs to a particular historical period

Old English/Anglo Saxon  --- before the Norman conquest (1066)  Beowulf (circa 700)  Order vs disorder

Middle English ? Medieval literature  1066 – 1550 (approximately)  Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1400)  Markedly Christian  The Christian ideal vs the reality of life in this imperfect world

Renaissance   Rebirth  Modern literature  Great changes  Elizabethan  Puritan  Restoration  17 th century: God as the true source of order: Milton

Eighteenth century  Augustan/Neoclassic  Secularism  Religious poetry  social poetry  Pope and Dryden  Social life – individual life in society  Harmony and balance can be created within society  Order, logic, reason

Romantic period  Neoclassicism vs romanticism  Harmony is in natural life  Feeling, emotion, individualism, nature  French Revolution  Poetry

Victorian  Develops not reacts against romantic literature  Complex society  Novel than poetry  Industrial revolution  Dickens  realism

20 th century  Wars  Elliot  Innovative and experimental in form  Modernist  American literature  Postmodern literature  Postcolonial literature  African American literature

 Each era = different values (figures)