A Brief History of English Literature
Literary forms
Literary forms such as the novel or lyric poem,
or genres, such as the horror-story, have a history. In one sense, they
appear because they have not been thought of before, but they also appear, or
become popular for other cultural reasons, such as the absence or emergence of
literacy. In studying the history of literature (or any kind of art), you are
challenged to consider
- what constitutes a given form,
- how it has developed, and
- whether it has a future.
The novels of the late Catherine Cookson may
have much in common with those of Charlotte Brontë, but is it worth mimicking
in the late 20th century, what was ground-breaking in the 1840s? While Brontë
examines what is contemporary for her, Miss Cookson invents an imagined past
which may be of interest to the cultural historian in studying
the present sources of her nostalgia, but not to the student of the
period in which her novels are set. Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe is a long work of prose fiction, but critics do not necessarily
describe it as a novel. Why might this be? Knowing works in their historical
context does not give easy answers, but may shed more or less light on our
darkness in considering such questions.
Old English, Middle
English and Chaucer
Old English
English, as we know it, descends from the language spoken
by the north Germanic tribes who settled in England from the 5th century A.D. onwards. They had no
writing (except runes, used as charms) until they learned the Latin alphabet
from Roman missionaries. The earliest written works in Old
English (as their language is now known to scholars) were probably
composed orally at first, and may have been passed on from speaker to speaker
before being written. We know the names of some of the later writers (Cædmon,
Ælfric and King Alfred) but most writing is anonymous. Old English
literature is mostly chronicle and poetry - lyric, descriptive but chiefly
narrative or epic. By the time literacy becomes widespread, Old English is effectively
a foreign and dead language. And its forms do not significantly affect
subsequent developments in English literature. (With the scholarly exception of
the 19th century poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who finds in Old English
verse the model for his metrical system of "sprung rhythm".)
Middle English and Chaucer
From 1066 onwards, the language is known to scholars as
Middle English. Ideas and themes from French and Celtic literature appear in
English writing at about this time, but the first great name in English
literature is that of Geoffrey Chaucer (?1343-1400). Chaucer
introduces the iambic pentameter line, the rhyming couplet and other rhymes
used in Italian poetry (a language in which rhyming is arguably much easier
than in English, thanks to the frequency of terminal vowels). Some of Chaucer's
work is prose and some is lyric poetry, but his greatest work is mostly
narrative poetry, which we find in Troilus and Criseyde and The
Canterbury Tales. Other notable mediaeval works are the anonymous Pearl and Gawain and the Green
Knight (probably by the same author) and William
Langlands' Piers Plowman.
Tudor lyric poetry
Modern lyric poetry in English begins in the early 16th
century with the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). Wyatt, who is greatly influenced by
the Italian, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) introduces the sonnet and
a range of short lyrics to English, while Surrey (as he is known) develops
unrhymed pentameters (or blank verse) thus inventing the verse form which will
be of great use to contemporary dramatists. A flowering of lyric poetry in the
reign of Elizabeth comes with such writers as Sir Philip
Sidney (1554-1586), Edmund Spenser(1552-1599), Sir Walter
Ralegh (1552-1618), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) andWilliam
Shakespeare (1564-1616). The major works of the time are
Spenser's Faerie Queene, Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare's
sonnets.
Renaissance drama
The first great English dramatist is Marlowe. Before the
16th century English drama meant the amateur performances of Bible stories by
craft guilds on public holidays. Marlowe's plays (Tamburlaine; Dr. Faustus;
Edward II and The Jew of Malta) use thefive act structure and the medium
of blank verse, which Shakespeare finds so productive. Shakespeare
develops and virtually exhausts this form, his Jacobean successors producing
work which is rarely performed today, though some pieces have literary merit,
notably The Duchess of Malfi and The White
Devil by John Webster(1580-1625) and The Revenger's
Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626). The excessive and
gratuitous violence of Jacobean plays leads to the clamour for closing down the
theatres, which is enacted by parliament after the Civil war.
Metaphysical poetry
The greatest of Elizabethan lyric poets is John
Donne (1572-1631), whose short love poems are characterized by wit and
irony, as he seeks to wrest meaning from experience. The preoccupation with the
big questions of love, death and religious faith marks out Donne and his successors
who are often called metaphysical poets. (This name, coined by Dr.
Samuel Johnson in an essay of 1779, was revived and popularized by T.S. Eliot,
in an essay of 1921. It can be unhelpful to modern students who are unfamiliar
with this adjective, and who are led to think that these poets belonged to some
kind of school or group - which is not the case.) After his wife's death, Donne
underwent a serious religious conversion, and wrote much fine devotional verse.
The best known of the other metaphysicals are George
Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) and Henry
Vaughan (1621-1695).
Epic poetry
Long narrative poems on heroic subjects mark the best
work of classical Greek (Homer's Iliad and Odyssey) and Roman
(Virgil's Æneid) poetry. John Milton (1608-1674) who was
Cromwell's secretary, set out to write a great biblical epic, unsure whether to
write in Latin or English, but settling for the latter in Paradise
Lost. John Dryden (1631-1700) also wrote epic poetry, on classical
and biblical subjects. Though Dryden's work is little read today it leads to a
comic parody of the epic form, or mock-heroic. The best poetry of the mid 18th
century is the comic writing of Alexander Pope(1688-1744). Pope is the
best-regarded comic writer and satirist of English poetry. Among his many
masterpieces, one of the more accessible is The Rape of the Lock(seekers
of sensation should note that "rape" here has its archaic sense of
"removal by force"; the "lock" is a curl of the heroine's
hair). Serious poetry of the period is well represented by the
neo-classical Thomas Gray (1716-1771) whose Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard virtually perfects the elegant style favoured at the
time.
Restoration comedy
On the death of Oliver Cromwell (in 1658) plays were no
longer prohibited. A new kind of comic drama, dealing with issues of sexual
politics among the wealthy and the bourgeois, arose. This is Restoration
Comedy, and the style developed well beyond the restoration period into the mid
18th century almost. The total number of plays performed is vast, and many lack
real merit, but the best drama uses the restoration conventions for a serious
examination of contemporary morality. A play which exemplifies this well
is The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1640-1716).
Prose fiction and the
novel
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), wrote satires in verse
and prose. He is best-known for the extended prose work Gulliver's
Travels, in which a fantastic account of a series of travels is the vehicle for
satirizing familiar English institutions, such as religion, politics and law.
Another writer who uses prose fiction, this time much more naturalistic, to
explore other questions of politics or economics is Daniel
Defoe (1661-1731), author ofRobinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.
The first English novel is generally accepted to
be Pamela (1740), by Samuel Richardson (1689-1761): this
novel takes the form of a series of letters; Pamela, a virtuous housemaid
resists the advances of her rich employer, who eventually marries her. Richardson's work was almost at once satirized by Henry
Fielding (1707-1754) inJoseph Andrews (Joseph is depicted as the
brother of Richardson's Pamela Andrews) and Tom Jones.
After Fielding, the novel is dominated by the two great
figures of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Jane
Austen (1775-1817), who typify, respectively, the new regional, historical
romanticism and the established, urbane classical views.
Novels depicting extreme behaviour, madness or cruelty,
often in historically remote or exotic settings are called Gothic. They
are ridiculed by Austen in Northanger Abbeybut include one undisputed
masterpiece, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1797-1851).
Romanticism
The rise of Romanticism
A movement in philosophy but especially in literature,
romanticism is the revolt of the senses or passions against the intellect and
of the individual against the consensus. Its first stirrings may be seen in the
work of William Blake (1757-1827), and in continental writers such as
the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German
playwrights Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller and Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe.
The publication, in 1798, by the poets William
Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
of a volume entitled Lyrical Ballads is a significant event in
English literary history, though the poems were poorly received and few books
sold. The elegant latinisms of Gray are dropped in favour of a kind of English
closer to that spoken by real people (supposedly). Actually, the attempts to render the speech of ordinary people
are not wholly convincing. Robert Burns (1759 1796) writes lyric
verse in the dialect of lowland Scots (a variety of English). After
Shakespeare, Burns is perhaps the most often quoted of writers in English: we
sing his Auld Lang Syne every New Year's Eve.
Later Romanticism
The work of the later romantics John
Keats (1795-1821) and his friend Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792-1822; husband of Mary Shelley) is marked by an attempt to
make language beautiful, and by an interest in remote history and exotic
places. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) uses romantic themes,
sometimes comically, to explain contemporary events. Romanticism begins as a
revolt against established views, but eventually becomes the established
outlook. Wordsworth becomes a kind of national monument, while the Victorians
make what was at first revolutionary seem familiar, domestic and sentimental.
Victorian poetry
The major poets of the Victorian era are Alfred,
Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) and Robert Browning (1812-1889). Both
are prolific and varied, and their work defies easy classification. Tennyson
makes extensive use of classical myth and Arthurian legend, and has been
praised for the beautiful and musical qualities of his writing.
Browning's chief interest is in people; he uses blank
verse in writing dramatic monologues in which the speaker achieves a kind of
self-portraiture: his subjects are both historical individuals (Fra Lippo
Lippi, Andrea del Sarto) and representative types or caricatures (Mr. Sludge the
Medium).
Other Victorian poets of note
include Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Gerard Manley
Hopkins (1844-1889) is notable for his use of what he calls "sprung
rhythm"; as in Old English verse syllables are not counted, but there is a
pattern of stresses. Hopkins' work was not well-known until very long after his
death.
The Victorian novel
The rise of the popular novel
In the 19th century, adult literacy increases markedly:
attempts to provide education by the state, and self-help schemes are partly
the cause and partly the result of the popularity of the
novel. Publication in instalments means that works are affordable for people of
modest means. The change in the reading public is reflected in a change in the
subjects of novels: the high bourgeois world of Austen gives way to an interest
in characters of humble origins. The great novelists write works which in some
ways transcend their own period, but which in detail very much explore the preoccupations
of their time.
Dickens and the Brontës
Certainly the greatest English novelist of the 19th
century, and possibly of all time, isCharles Dickens (1812-1870). The
complexity of his best work, the variety of tone, the use of irony and
caricature create surface problems for the modern reader, who may not readily
persist in reading. But Great Expectations, Bleak House, Our Mutual
Friendand Little Dorrit are works with which every student should be
acquainted.
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and her sisters Emily
(1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849) are understandably linked together, but their
work differs greatly. Charlotte is notable for several good novels, among which her
masterpiece is Jane Eyre, in which we see the heroine, after much
adversity, achieve happiness on her own terms. Emily Brontë'sWüthering Heights is a strange work, which enjoys almost cult
status. Its concerns are more romantic, less contemporary than those
of Jane Eyre - but its themes of obsessive love and self-destructive
passion have proved popular with the 20th century reader.
The beginnings of American literature
The early 19th century sees the emergence of American
literature, with the stories ofEdgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the novels
of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), Herman Melville (1819-91),
and Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens; 1835-1910), and the poetry
of Walt Whitman (1819-92) and Emily Dickinson (1830-86).
Notable works include Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby Dick,
Twain's Huckleberry Finnand Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
Later Victorian novelists
After the middle of the century, the novel, as a form,
becomes firmly-established: sensational or melodramatic "popular"
writing is represented by Mrs. Henry Wood'sEast Lynne (1861), but the
best novelists achieved serious critical acclaim while reaching a wide public,
notable authors being Anthony Trollope (1815-82), Wilkie
Collins (1824-89), William Makepeace
Thackeray (1811-63), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans; 1819-80)
and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Among the best novels are Collins'sThe
Moonstone, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Eliot's The Mill on the Floss,
Adam Bede andMiddlemarch, and Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, The
Return of the Native, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.
Modern literature
Early 20th century poets
W.B. (William Butler) Yeats (1865-1939) is one of
two figures who dominate modern poetry, the other being T.S. (Thomas
Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965). Yeats was Irish; Eliot was born in the USA but settled in England, and took UK citizenship in 1927. Yeats uses conventional lyric
forms, but explores the connection between modern themes and classical and
romantic ideas. Eliot uses elements of conventional forms, within an
unconventionally structured whole in his greatest works. Where Yeats is
prolific as a poet, Eliot's reputation largely rests on two long and complex
works: The Waste Land(1922) and Four Quartets (1943).
The work of these two has overshadowed the work of the
best late Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian poets, some of whom came to
prominence during the First World War. Among these are Thomas Hardy,
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), A.E.
Housman (1859-1936), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Rupert
Brooke (1887-1915), Siegfried Sassoon(1886-1967), Wilfred
Owen (1893-1918) and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918). The most
celebrated modern American poet, is Robert Frost (1874-1963), who
befriended Edward Thomas before the war of 1914-1918.
Early modern writers
The late Victorian and early modern periods are spanned
by two novelists of foreign birth: the American Henry
James (1843-1916) and the Pole Joseph Conrad (Josef
Korzeniowski; 1857-1924). James relates character to issues of culture and
ethics, but his style can be opaque; Conrad's narratives may resemble adventure
stories in incident and setting, but his real concern is with issues of
character and morality. The best of their work would include James's The
Portrait of a Lady and Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
Nostromo and The Secret Agent.
Other notable writers of the early part of the century
include George Bernard Shaw(1856-1950), H.G. Wells (1866-1946),
and E.M. Forster (1879-1970). Shaw was an essay-writer, language
scholar and critic, but is best-remembered as a playwright. Of his many plays,
the best-known is Pygmalion (even better known today in its form as
the musical My Fair Lady). Wells is celebrated as a popularizer of
science, but his best novels explore serious social and cultural
themes, The History of Mr. Polly being perhaps his masterpiece.
Forster's novels include Howard's End, A Room with a Viewand A
Passage to India.
Joyce and Woolf
Where these writers show continuity with the Victorian
tradition of the novel, more radically modern writing is found in the novels
of James Joyce (1882-1941), of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941),
and of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Where Joyce and Woolf challenge
traditional narrative methods of viewpoint and structure, Lawrence is concerned to explore human relationships more
profoundly than his predecessors, attempting to marry the insights of the new
psychology with his own acute observation. Working-class characters are
presented as serious and dignified; their manners and speech are not objects of
ridicule.
Other notable novelists include George
Orwell (1903-50), Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966),Graham Greene (1904-1991)
and the 1983 Nobel prize-winner, William Golding (1911-1993).
Poetry in the later 20th century
Between the two wars, a revival of romanticism in poetry
is associated with the work ofW.H. (Wystan Hugh)
Auden (1907-73), Louis MacNeice (1907-63) and Cecil
Day-Lewis(1904-72). Auden seems to be a major figure on the poetic landscape,
but is almost too contemporary to see in perspective. The Welsh
poet, Dylan Thomas (1914-53) is notable for strange effects of
language, alternating from extreme simplicity to massive overstatement.
Of poets who have achieved celebrity in the second half
of the century, evaluation is even more difficult, but writers of note include
the American Robert Lowell (1917-77),Philip
Larkin (1922-1985), R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Thom
Gunn (1929-2004), Ted Hughes (1930-1998) and the 1995 Nobel
laureate Seamus Heaney (b. 1939).
Notable writers outside
mainstream movements
Any list of "important" names is bound to be
uneven and selective. Identifying broad movements leads to the exclusion of
those who do not easily fit into schematic outlines of history. Writers not
referred to above, but highly regarded by some readers might
include Laurence Sterne (1713-68), author of Tristram
Shandy, R.L. Stevenson(1850-94) writer of Kidnapped and The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900),
author of The Importance of Being Earnest, and novelists such asArnold
Bennett (1867-1931), John Galsworthy (1867-1933) and the
Americans F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), John
Steinbeck (1902-68) andJ.D. Salinger (b. 1919). Two works notable not
just for their literary merit but for their articulation of the spirit of the
age are Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Salinger's The Catcher
in the Rye. The American dramatist Arthur Miller (b.
1915) has received similar acclaim for his play Death of a
Salesman (1949). Miller is more popular in the UK than his native country, and is familiar to many
teachers and students because his work is so often set for study in
examinations.
Literature and culture
Literature has a history, and this connects with cultural
history more widely. Prose narratives were written in the 16th
century, but the novel as we know it could not arise, in the absence of a
literate public. The popular and very contemporary medium for narrative in the
16th century is the theatre. The earliest novels reflect a bourgeois view of
the world because this is the world of the authors and their readers (working
people are depicted, but patronizingly, not from inside knowledge). The growth
of literacy in the Victorian era leads to enormous diversification in the
subjects and settings of the novel.
Recent and future trends
In recent times the novel has developed
different genres such as the thriller, the whodunnit, the pot-boiler,
the western and works of science-fiction, horror and the sex-and-shopping
novel. Some of these may be brief fashions (the western seems to be dying)
while others such as the detective story or science-fiction have survived for
well over a century. As the dominant form of narrative in contemporary western
popular culture, the novel may have given way to the feature film and
television drama. But it has proved surprisingly resilient. As society alters,
so the novel may reflect or define this change; many works may be written, but
few of them will fulfil this defining rôle; those which seem to do so now, may
not speak to later generations in the same way.
Evaluating literature
The "test of time" may be a cliché, but is a
genuine measure of how a work of imagination can transcend cultural boundaries;
we should, perhaps, now speak of the "test of time and place",
as the best works cross boundaries of both kinds. We may not "like"
or "enjoy" works such as Wüthering Heights, Heart of Darkness or The Waste Land, but
they are the perfect expression of particular ways of looking at the world; the
author has articulated a view which connects with the reader's search for
meaning. It is, of course, perfectly possible for a work of imagination to make
sense of the world or of experience (or love, or God, or death)
while also entertaining or delighting the reader or audience with the
detail and eloquence of the work, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Great Expectations.
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Time Span
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Terms
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Movements
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Examples
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600 – 1200
Old English (Anglo-Saxon)
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Beowulf
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1200- 1500
Middle English
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Geoffrey Chaucer
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1500 – 1660
The English Renaissance
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1500 – 1558
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Tudor Period
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Humanist Era
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Thomas More, John Skelton
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1558-1603
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Elizabethan Period
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High Renaissance
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Edmund Spenser,
Sir Philip Sidney,
William Shakespeare
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1603-1625
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Jacobean Period
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Mannerist Style (1590-1640)
other styles: Metaphysical Poets; Devotional Poets
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Shakespeare,
John Donne,
George Herbert,
Emilia Lanyer
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1625-1649
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Caroline Period
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Baroque Style, and later,
Rococo Style
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John Ford,
John Milton
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1649-1660
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The Commonwealth &
The Protectorate
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Milton,
Andrew Marvell,
Thomas Hobbes
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1660-1700
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The Restoration
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The Enlightenment;
Neoclassical Period;
The Augustan Age
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John Dryden
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1700-1800
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The Eighteenth Century
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The Age of Revolution
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Alexander Pope,
Jonathan Swift,
Samuel Johnson
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1785-1830
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Romanticism
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Baroque Style, and later,
Rococo Style
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William Wordsworth,
S.T. Coleridge,
Jane Austen,
The Brontës
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1830-1901
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Victorian Period
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Early, Middle and Late
Victorian
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Charles Dickens,
George Eliot,
Robert Browning,
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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1901-1960
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Modern Period
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The Edwardian Era
(1901-1910);
The Georgian Era
(1910-1914)
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G.M. Hopkins,
H.G. Wells,
James Joyce,
D.H. Lawrence,
T.S. Eliot
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1960- present
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Postmodern and
Contemporary Period
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Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing,
John Fowles, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt
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