Praxis 5039 (Literary Time Periods)

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Homeric or Heroic Period

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1200-800 BCE during the Classical Period; oral Greek legends; chaotic period of warrior princes, wanderers, sea traders, and fierce pirates; works include The Iliad and The Odyssey

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Classical Greek Period

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800-200 BCE during the Classical Period; the sophisticated age of the polis, or individual city-state, and early democracy; some of the world's finest art, poetry, drama, architecture, and philosophy originate in Athens; writers include Gorgias, Aesop, Plato, Sophoclese, Aristotle, Euripides, and Socrates

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Classical Roman Period

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200 BCCE-455 CE of the Classical Period; Romans conquer Greece, playwrights include Plautus and Terence; writers include Ovid, Horace, and Virgil; philosophers include Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius; rhetoricians include Cicero and Quintilian

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Patristic Period

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70-455 CE of the Classical Period; early Christian writings appear from Saint Augustine, Tertian, Saint Cyprian, Saint Ambrose, and Saint Jerome (who compiled the Bible); barbarians conquer Rome in 455 CE

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Old English/Anglo-Saxon Period

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428-1066 of the Medieval Period; the "Dark Ages" (455-798) occur when Rome falls and the barbarian tribes move into Europe; early Old English epics such as Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer originate late in this period; the Carolingian Renaissance occurs in Europe (800-855), which marks the setting of Viking sagas, and includes early Medieval grammars, encyclopedia, and the like

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The Middle English Period

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106-1450 of the Medieval Period; the French invade and conquer England under William I; ends Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and marks the emergency of the 12th Century Renaissance (1100-1200); French authors spread in popularity; writers include Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Jean de Meun

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Late or "High" Medieval Period

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1200-1485 of the Medieval Period; a tumultuous period marked by the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the "Gaiwan" or "Pearl" Poet, the Wakefield Master, and William Langland; other writers include Boccaccio, Petrarch, Dante, and Christine de Piou

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The Renaissance and the Reformation Period

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1485-1660; occurs in the late 15th, 16th, and early 17th centuries in Britain; but somewhat earlier in Italy and southern Europe, and somewhat later in northern Europe; includes the Early Tudor Period, Elizabethan Period, Jacobean Period, Caroline Age, and the Commonwealth Period or Puritan Interregnum

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Early Tudor Period

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1485-1558of the Renaissance and Reformation Period; War of the Roses ends; Henry VII claims the throne; protestantism rises; Edmund Spencer is poet of this time

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Elizabethan Period

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1558-1603 of the Renaissance and Reformation Period; Queen Elizabeth I saves England from both Spanish invasion and squabbles at home; her reign is marked by early works of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and Sir Philip Sydney

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Jacobean Period

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1603-1625 of the Renaissance and Restoration Period; Shakespeare writes his later works; Amelia Lanyer, Ben Johnson, and John Donne make their marks

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Caroline Age

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1625-1649 of the Renaissance and Reformation Period; John Milton, George Hebert, Robert Henick, and the "Sons of Ben," among others write during the reign of Charles I and his Cavaliers

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Commonwealth Period or Puritan Interregnum

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1649-1660 of the Renaissance and Reformation Period; under Oliver Cromwell's Puritan dictatorship, John Milton continues to write; other writers include Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Browne

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The Enlightenment (Neo-Classical) Period

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1660-1790; increased influence of classical literature; increased reverence for logic and disdain for superstition; marked by the rise of deism, intellectual backlash against earlier Puritanism, and the American Revolution against England; includes the Restoration Period, the Augustan Age, and the Age of Johnson

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Restoration Period

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1660-1700 of the Enlightenment Period; marks British king's restoration to the throne after Puritan domination; includes French and classical influences on poetry and drama; writers include John Dryden, John Locke, Jason Racine, and Jean-Baptiste Moliere

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Augustan Age

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1700-1750 of the Enlightenment Period; marked by the imitation of Virgil and Horace's literature in English letters; writers include Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Sir Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, and Francios-Marie Arouet Voltaire

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Age of Johnson

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1750-1790 of the Enlightenment Period; marks the transition toward the upcoming romanticism, though the period is still largely neoclassical; writers include Dr. Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (who are neoclassical), and Robert Burns, Thomas Grey, William Cowpen, and George Crabbe (show movement away from the neoclassical ideal); in America, this period is called the Colonial Period and includes writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine

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Romantic Period

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1790-1830; male poets focus on nature,imagination, and individuality; English poets include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley; Jane Austen writes at this time; German writer was Johann von Goethe; in America, this period is mirrored by the Transcendental Period from 1830-1850; transcendentalists include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; Gothic writing (1790-1890) emerges; gothic writers include Ann Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Victorian Period and the 19th Century

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1832-1901; typified by sentimental novels of the queen's reign; British writers include Elizabeth Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mathew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte; Pre-raphaelites Christina and Dante Rossetti and William Morris idealize and long for the morality of the medieval world; the end of this period is marked by movements of aestheticism and "decadence" in the writing of Walter Pates and Oscar Wilde; in America, naturalist writers like Stephen Crane flourish along with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickerson (free verse poets)

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Modern Period

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1914-1945; British writers include WB Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Wilfred Owen; American writers include Robert Frost, Flannery O'Connor, and "Jazz Age" writers of the Lost Generation: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner; Harlem Renaissance marks the emergence of black writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; most writers of this time focus on realism

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Postmodern Period

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1945-onward; writers who experiment with fragmented poetry and metafiction include T.S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Sir Tom Stoppard, John Fowles, Italo Calvino, Allen Ginsberg, and Thomas Pynchon; multiculturalism leads to canonization of non-caucasian writers like Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neale Hurston; "magic" realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Gunter Gras, and Salmon Rushdie embellish realism with surrealistic writings