British Literary History

Large debates about whether or not England should support Revolution. The Pamphlet War included figures such as Price, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Paine.

End of the Napoleonic Wars

Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Holman Hung, and John Everett Millais form the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, focused on the beauty in art.

Darwin's ideas were very influential, and were echoed by others such as Arnold.

Same year that France fell, and the war became more severe in the UK.

The British Empire is crumbling further, leading to a sort of identity crisis for some English citizens.

Songs of Innocence & Experience
Works were not mass produced, but were hand carved.

Lyrical Ballads was produced in 1798, Wordsworth became Poet Laureate from 1843-1850, and the Prelude to Lyrical Ballads was published posthumously in 1850.

Coleridge, good friends with Wordsworth and involved in the production of Lyrical Ballads, wrote "Kubla Kahn" in 1797 (published 1816), and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", opening poem in Lyrical Ballads.

Wrote six novels, her first being Northanger Abbey in the 1790s, but not published until after her death.

Lord Byron was famous for the invention of the "Byronic Hero", as featured in his works such as "Manfred" and "Don Juan"

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote "Ode to the West Wind", "To Wordsworth", "Ozymandius" and "Defense of Poetry"

Keats was famous for his Odes, the concept of the Chameleon Poet

Author of "Frankenstein" and the short story "The Mortal Immortal", she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Goldwin, and the wife of Percy Shelley.

"Aurora Leigh" in 1857, epic poem, verse novel. Famous for her "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (1850) which she wrote during her courtship with Robert Browning.

Poet Laureate from 1850 to 1892, incredibly musical poetry. Wrote "In Memoriam"

Pioneer of industrial fiction and regional fiction, as well as a writer of ghost stories.

Most famous for his practice of the Dramatic Monologue, and regarded as a "missing link" in poetic history between Keats's "Chameleon Poet" and T.S. Eliot's escape from himself. Famous works include "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess".

Wrote poetry such as "Dover Beach" but was more famous for his poetic criticism, and use of "Touchstones".

A Christian writer in the Pre-Raphaelite circle (her brother Dante largely led the group), famous for writing poems such as "Goblin Market" and "Up-Hill".

Novelist and poet.

A poet famous for use of Inscape, Instress,and Sprung Rhythm.

Great satirist and leader of the Aesthetic Movement - "Wilde laughed the Victorian age to death"

Most famous for writing "Sherlock Holmes" stories, but wrote in many other genres as well (fantasy, sci-fi, drama, poetry, historical novel, romance, non-fiction).

Wrote both very romantic poetry ("The Lake Isle of Innisfree") and modern poetry ("The Second Coming"). An Anglo-Irish man, who had to work out the tension between his English and Irish influences.

Joyce wrote four books, "Dubliners" (1914), "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916), "Ulysses" (1922) and "Finnegan's Wake" (1939). The "arguably most important fiction writer of the century" liked to keep things obscure, each book getting harder to understand or further from the typical novel form.

The most stereotypical choice of a "Modern" poet, writer of modernist manifesto, said art was not an expression of personality or a turning loose of emotion, but an extinction, or escape of personality.

Socialist ideas, wrote "Animal Farm" and "Shooting an Elephant", both of which were highly politically charged.

Major writer in the genre "theater of the absurd", highly minimalist, his writing followed some of the trends such as surrealism, existentialism, naturalism, and stream of consciousness.

Highly celebrated Welsh poet, most famous for "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night", a villainelle. Used themes of life and death and used the Bible, Welsh folklore, and Freud to inform his poetry.

Part of "The Movement", straight forward writing acting against the romanticized poetry of the 1940s and 50s.

Winner of the Nobel prize (2005), lecturer, poet and scholar (translated Beowulf)