Humanities

The Classical Period (1200 BCE - 455 CE)

The Homeric or Heroic period lasted from 1200-800 BCE. During this time period, Greek legends were passed down orally. Notable works of this period were The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer.

The Classical Greek period took place from 800-200 BCE. Prominent Greek writers, playwrights and philosophers of this time included Aesop (Aesop's Fables), Plato (The Republic and The Allegory of the Cave), Socrates (the Socratic Method), Aristotle (the Corpus Aristotelicum) and Sophocles (Oedipus the King and Antigone).

The fifth century was renowned as the Golden Age of Greece. This was an era of early democracy with the emergence of the some of the world's finest art, poetry, drama, architecture, and philosophy originating from Athens.

The Medieval Period (455 -1485)

The Old English Anglo-Saxon Period lasted from 428-1066 CE. This time period was called the "Dark Ages" as it occurred after the fall of Rome. The printing press had not yet been invented, and many important works may have simply been lost to history due to the inability to quickly reproduce them. Famous works of this time include Beowulf, written by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, and The Wanderer, also written by an unknown poet. Anonymity is a common factor of this period. In central Europe, early medieval grammars and encyclopedias were created.

Following the Old English period was the Middle English Period from 1066-1450 CE. In 1066, Norman French armies invaded and conquered England under William I, which marked the end of Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and the beginning of the Twelfth Century Renaissance from 1100-1200 CE. French chivalric romances and French fables were very popular.

The Late or "High" Medieval Period followed the Middle English Period from 1200-1485 CE. This period was marked by the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales) and Dante (The Divine Comedy and Inferno). Unsurprisingly for the time period, a lot of the works, including the two just mentioned, were written within a religious context, which means that they were driven by religious motivations.

The Renaissance and Reformation (1485-1660)

The Renaissance took place in the late 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries in Britain. Its name means "rebirth," and that implies that the Renaissance was a flourishing of arts and other culture that swept across Europe during this time.

· The early Tudor Period lasted from 1485-1558. The War of the Roses ended with Henry VIII claiming the throne of England and Martin Luther's split from the Catholic Church and the emergence of Protestantism.

· The Elizabethan Period lasted from 1558-1603. Queen Elizabeth was on the throne of England, and her reign is marked by the early works of William Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew, ca. 1592) and Christopher Marlowe (The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus).

· The Jacobean Period spanned from 1603-1625. This period included Shakespeare's later works, such as The Tempest (1611) and John Donne.

· The Caroline Age from 1625-1649 included authors such as John Milton (L"Allegro and Il Penseroso) and George Herbert (The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, 1633).

· The Commonwealth Period/Puritan Interregnum lasted from 1649-1660, and important authors included John Milton (Paradise Lost, 1667), Andrew Marvell ("To His Coy Mistress," ca. 1649-1660) and Sir Thomas Browne (The Garden of Cyrus, 1658).

During the Renaissance, writers began to think about their position in the world independently of religious motivations. Renaissance creators valued the dignity of man and the joys of society much more than pervious writers, and this would develop into Humanism. The Renaissance also gave birth to the Protestant Reformation as people began to question the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Criticism and the creation of something new was a crucial mark of this period, both in religion with the Reformation and in the works of art. In addition, the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, which made it possible to quickly reproduce ideas, occurred in the mid-1500s.

The Enlightenment (Neoclassical) Period (1660-1790)

The Enlightenment period included the Restoration Period and the Augustan Age. Authors during the Enlightenment began to question the practices of their predecessors, and began to ask all kinds of questions dealing with science, logic and intellectual discourse. Many artists, philosophers and scientists of this time stopped accepting things on "blind faith" and rather tried to discover the truths of the world.

· The Restoration period lasted from 1660-1700 and was dominated by the French and Classical influences on poetry and drama. Influential writers of the time were John Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) and Moliere (Tartuffe ou l'Imposteur, 1669).

· The Augustan Age from 1700-1750 was characterized by imitation of Virgil and Horace's literature in English letters. Important writers were Sir Richard Steele (The Tatler, 1709), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, 1726), Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock, 1712-14), and Voltaire (Zaïre, 1732).

· Lastly, the period that marked the transition toward Romanticism was the Age of Johnson from 1750-1790, named for Dr. Samuel Johnson. In America, this was called the Colonial Period and included Ben Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1732),Thomas Jefferson (The Declaration of Independence, 1776) and Thomas Paine (Common Sense, 1776) as colonial and revolutionary writers.

The Romantic Period (1790-1830)

The Romantic Period was characterized by an emphasis on individualism and emotions. Writers at this time glorified the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical, especially through poetry. This period was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, as well as the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific rationalization of nature. The Romantic Period included poets such as William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793), John Keats ("Ode to a Nightingale" (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelly ("Ode to the West Wind," 1819), who wrote about nature, imagination and individuality in England. Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1813) also wrote during this time. In America, this period was called the Transcendental period and included Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Self-Reliance," 1841) and Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854).

Gothic writings from 1790-1890 overlap with the Romantic and Victorian periods. Gothic writers included Bram Stoker (Dracula, 1897), Edgar Allen Poe ("The Raven," 1845) and Nathanial Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1850).

The Victorian Period and the 19th Century (1832-1901)

While poetry was the dominant genre of the Romantic period, the novel was the central genre of the Victorian period. The Victorian period took place during the reign of Queen Victoria in England. Writers from the Victorian period included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning ("How Do I Love Thee? Sonnet 43," 1845), Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, 1861), Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights, 1847), and Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, 1847). The end of the Victorian Period includes Aestheticism, such as the writings of Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895), and the free verse poets, such as Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1855) and Emily Dickinson ("Success is Counted Sweetest," 1890).

The Modern Period (1914-1965)

The Modernist period in English Literature occupied the time period from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century through approximately 1965. This period was marked by unexpected and sudden breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Where in the past experimentation and individualism were often strongly discouraged, these characteristics became virtues during the Modern period. In England, the modernist writers included William Butler Yeats ("The Wanderings of Oisin", 1889) and Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, 1925). In America, Robert Frost ("The Road Not Taken," 1916) and Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, 1955) were modernists as were the writers of the "Lost Generation" or the "Jazz Age," which included Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms, 1929), Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925), and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, 1929). The Harlem Renaissance marks the rise of black writers such as James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953) and Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man, 1952).

The Postmodern Period (1945 - onward)

Postmodern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator which is considered to have developed after WWII. Postmodern works are seen as a response against Enlightenment thinking and Modernism. Postmodern writers and playwrights experiment with fragmented poetry and metafiction, which emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds readers to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional work.. Postmodernism is marked by authors such as T.S. Eliot (The Wasteland, 1922), Kurt Vonnegut (The Slaughterhouse Five, 1969), Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987), and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, 19548-49).