Chapter One Old and Medieval Literature
Old English Literature (450-- 1066)
Beowulf
Other Poems
Prose
Middle English Literature (1066--1485)
The Gawain Poet
Other Poets
Geoffrey Chaucer ( 1340 -- 1400)
Chapter Two Renaissance and Reformation Literature
Background
Thomas More (1478-- 1535 )
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503--1542) and Henry Howard
The Earl of Surrey (1518--1547)
Sir Philip Sidney (1554--1586) and Walter Raleigh
(1527--1618)
Edmund Spenser (1552-- 1599)
Early Drama
The University Wits
Christopher Marlowe (1564-- 1593)
William Shakespeare (1564--1616)
Chapter Three The 17th Century
Shakespeare's Successors
Ben Jonson (1573--1637)
Other Playwrights
John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets
John Milton (1608--1674)
Prose
Francis Bacon (1561--1626)
The English Bible
Other Prose Writers
John Bunyan (1628--1688)
John Dryden (1631--1700)
Chapter Four The 18th Century
Prose
Jonathan Swift (1667--1745)
The Rise of the Novel
Daniel Defoe (1660--1731)
Samuel Richardson ( 1689-- 1761)
Henry Fielding (1707--1754)
Tobias Smollett (1721--1771)
Poetry
Alexander Pope (1688--1744)
Thomas Gray (1716--1771)
Late 18th Century Literature
Oliver Goldsmith (1730--1774)
Laurence Sterne (1713--1768)
Samuel Johnson (1709--1784)
Richard Sheridan (1751 -- 1816)
Edward Gibbon (1737--1794)
Edmund Burke (1729--1797)
The Gothic Novel
Robert Burns (1759--1796)
Chapter Five The Age of Romanticism (1790--1840)
Background
Romantic Poets
William Wordsworth (1770-- 1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-- 1834)
George Gordon Byron (1788--1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-- 1822)
John Keats (1795--1821)
Prose
Charles Lamb (1775--1834)
Thomas de Quincey (1785--1859)
William Hazlitt (1778--1830)
Robert Southey (1774--1843)
Leigh Hunt (1784--1859)
John Gibson Lockhart (1794--1854)
Novel
Walter Scott (1771--1832)
Jane Austen (1775--1817)
Minor Novelists
Chapter six Victorian Literature (1837-- 1901)
Poetry
Alfred Tennyson (1809-- 1892)
Robert Browning (1812-- 1889)
Other Poets
Prose
Thomas Carlyle (1795--1881)
Thomas Macaulay (1800-- 1859)
John Ruskin (1819--1900)
Walter Pater (1839-- 1894)
Novel
The Bronte Sisters
Other Writers
Charles Dickens (1812--1870)
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-- 1863)
George Eliot (1819-- 1880)
Anthony Trollope (1815--1882)
George Meredith (1828-- 1909)
Thomas Hardy (1840-- 1928)
Literature of the firrde-siecle
Chapter Seven First Half of the 20th Century
Background
Poetry
Georgian Poetry and War Poetry
Modernist Poetry
William Butler Yeats (1865--1939)
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-- 1965)
Poetry of the Thirties and Forties
Drama
George Bernard Shaw (1856-- 1950)
Irish Dramatic Renaissance
Novel
Traditional Novel
Modernist Novel
Working Class Novel in the 1930s
Satirical Fiction
Chapter Eight Second Half of the 20th Century
Drama
Harold Pinter (1930-- )
John Osborne (1929--1994)
Arnold Wesker (1932-- )
Joe Orton (1933--1967)
Other Dramatists
Poetry
Philip Larkin (1922--1985)
Ted Hughes (1930--1999)
Geoffrey Hill (1932-- )
Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913--2000)
Seamus Heaney (1939-- )
Other Poets
Novel
The Angry Young Men
Other Novelists
Campus Novel
Historical Novel
Regional Novel
Other Recent Novelists
Chronology
References