English Literature by Ages

The whole subject, in order

English literature is usually taught in fragments — a poem here, a movement there, a theorist mentioned once and never explained. This page arranges it the way the subject actually developed, so that you can see where any single text belongs.

Period boundaries are a convention, not a fact. Scholars draw these lines differently, and a writer at the edge of two ages often belongs to both.

Ages and periods

Old English

450 – 1066

Beowulf · Caedmon · Cynewulf

Notes coming soon

Middle English

1066 – 1500

Chaucer · Langland · Malory

Notes coming soon

Renaissance

1500 – 1603

Shakespeare · Marlowe · Spenser

Notes coming soon

Jacobean & Caroline

1603 – 1660

Donne · Jonson · Webster

Notes coming soon

Restoration

1660 – 1700

Dryden · Behn · Congreve

Notes coming soon

Augustan

1700 – 1798

Pope · Swift · Johnson

Notes coming soon

Romantic

1798 – 1837

Wordsworth · Coleridge · Keats

Notes coming soon

Victorian

1837 – 1901

Dickens · Tennyson · Hardy

Read the notes

Modern

1901 – 1945

Eliot · Woolf · Joyce

Notes coming soon

Contemporary

1945 →

Beckett · Larkin · Rushdie

Notes coming soon

Where to go next