1. HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Compiled by: Thomas Youman

2. 1. What is Literature?  Literature refers to the practice and profession of writing. It comes from human interest in telling a story, in arranging words in artistic forms, in describing in words some aspects of human experiences.

3. 2. Why we read Literature?  Pleasure  Relaxation  Knowledge

4. 3. Old English Period 469 AD - 1066 AD  Three conquests.  The Song of Beowulf:

5. Middle English Literature  Bible translations,  Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

6. Renaissance Literature  Vernacular Literature.  William Caxton.  Book of Common Prayer.

7. Early Modern Period  Elizabethan Era  Jacobean Literature  Caroline and Cromwellian Literature  Restoration Literature  Augustan Literature.

8. Elizabethan Era  William Shakespeare  Hamlet,  Romeo and Juliet,  The Merchant of Venice  Macbeth

9. Jacobean Literature  Post-Shakespeare.  Dramatist Ben Jonson: Theory of Humors Theory of Humors Beaumont and Fletcher The Knight of the Burning Pestle

10. Caroline and Cromwellian Literature  Commonwealth.  Samuel Pepys.  Great Plague.  Great Fire of London.

11. Restoration Literature  John Milton:  Paradise Lost  The Country Wife  Pilgrim’s Progress

12. Augustan Literature  Jonathan Swift:  A Tale of a Tub  Gulliver’s Travels

13. 18th Century  Age of Enlightment.  Age of Sensibility.  Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto

14. Romanticism  Industrialism.  William Blake: Romantic Age  Oscar Wilde  Mary Shelley:

15. Victorian Literature  Charles Dickens.  Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlok Holmes

16. English Literature since 1900  Modernism: Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf  Post-Modern Literature: Truman Capote  Post World War II: J.R.R. Tolkien