Quick Review

## 🌟 **English Literary Periods – One-Page Quick Review**

### 📜 **1. Old English / Anglo-Saxon Period** *(450–1066, 5th–11th Century)*

**👑 King/Context**: Tribal England; Alfred the Great

**🛠️ Development**: Oral tradition, heroic poetry, religious texts

**✍️ Writers**: Anonymous, Caedmon, Cynewulf

**📘 Works**: *Beowulf*, *The Seafarer*

**💡 Concepts**: Heroism, fate (wyrd), loyalty, Christian-pagan fusion

**🎭 Movements**: Oral poetry, alliterative verse

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### 🏰 **2. Middle English Period** *(1066–1500, 11th–15th Century)*

**👑 Norman Kings, Edward III, Richard II**

**🛠️ Development**: Feudal system, chivalry, French/Latin influence

**✍️ Writers**: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Julian of Norwich

**📘 Works**: *The Canterbury Tales*, *Piers Plowman*

**💡 Concepts**: Courtly love, morality, allegory, estates satire

**🎭 Movements**: Allegorical poetry, religious drama

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### 🎨 **3. Renaissance Period** *(1500–1660, 16th–17th Century)*

**👑 Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I**

**🛠️ Development**: Humanism, Protestant Reformation, exploration

**✍️ Writers**: William Shakespeare, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Marlowe

**📘 Works**: *Hamlet*, *The Faerie Queene*, *Holy Sonnets*

**💡 Concepts**: Tragedy, Metaphysical poetry, Divine Right

**🎭 Movements**: Elizabethan drama, Metaphysical poetry

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### 🏛️ **4. Neoclassical Period** *(1660–1798, 17th–18th Century)*

**👑 Charles II, Queen Anne, George III**

**🛠️ Development**: Restoration of monarchy, Enlightenment

**✍️ Writers**: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift

**📘 Works**: *The Rape of the Lock*, *Gulliver’s Travels*

**💡 Concepts**: Reason, order, satire, decorum

**🎭 Movements**: Restoration comedy, Augustan satire

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### 💖 **5. Romantic Period** *(1798–1837, late 18th–early 19th Century)*

**👑 George III, George IV, early Victoria**

**🛠️ Development**: Industrial revolution, French Revolution influence

**✍️ Writers**: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Blake

**📘 Works**: *Lyrical Ballads*, *Ode to a Nightingale*

**💡 Concepts**: Nature, imagination, individualism, sublime

**🎭 Movements**: Lake Poets, Gothic novels

### 👗 **6. Victorian Period** *(1837–1901, 19th Century)*

**👑 Queen Victoria**

**🛠️ Development**: Empire expansion, morality, social reform

**✍️ Writers**: Charles Dickens, Brontë sisters, Tennyson, Arnold

**📘 Works**: *Jane Eyre*, *Great Expectations*, *In Memoriam*

**💡 Concepts**: Realism, morality, progress, doubt

**🎭 Movements**: Realism, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

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### 🎨 **7. Aestheticism & Decadence / Pre-Raphaelites** *(1837–1901 overlapping late Victorian)*

**👑 Late Victorian Age**

**🛠️ Development**: Art for art’s sake, beauty above all

**✍️ Writers**: Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

**📘 Works**: *The Picture of Dorian Gray*, *Goblin Market*

**💡 Concepts**: Sensuality, aestheticism, symbolism

**🎭 Movements**: Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic Movement

### 🔄 **8. Modern Period** *(1901–1950, 20th Century)*

**👑 Edward VII, George V**

**🛠️ Development**: WWI, fragmentation, industrialization

**✍️ Writers**: T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W\.B. Yeats

**📘 Works**: *The Waste Land*, *Ulysses*, *To the Lighthouse*

**💡 Concepts**: Stream of consciousness, alienation, mythic method

**🎭 Movements**: Modernism, Imagism, Bloomsbury Group

### 🌀 **9. Postmodern Period** *(1950–Present)*

**👑 Elizabeth II, Charles III (contemporary)**

**🛠️ Development**: WWII aftermath, digital age, globalization

**✍️ Writers**: Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood

**📘 Works**: *Waiting for Godot*, *The Handmaid’s Tale*, *Midnight’s Children*

**💡 Concepts**: Irony, metafiction, intertextuality, identity crisis

**🎭 Movements**: Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Feminism, Magic Realism