Literary Movements and Periods

• Beowulf
• The Dream of the Rood

• Chaucer
• Gawain

Authors:
William Shakespeare
Christopher Marlowe
John Milton
John Donne
Ben Jonson
Edmund Spenser

John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among the earliest works of American literature.

Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.

Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.

The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped the political direction of the United States.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a quintessentially American life story.

Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

New England writers, the “Brahmins,” notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell.

Transcendentalists, centered in the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, and Margaret Fuller.

The abolition movement was also bolstered by other New England writers, including the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) dramatized the plight of the black slave.

Apart from the Transcendentalists, there emerged during this period great imaginative writers—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—whose novels and poetry left a permanent imprint on American literature. Contemporary with these writers but outside the New England circle was the Southern genius Edgar Allan Poe, who later in the century had a strong impact on European literature.

Three Parts
-Restoration
-Augustan
-Age of Johnson

John Dryden
To My Honored friend, Dr. Charleton, Epigrams, Of Satire

Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
The Tatler, The Spectator

Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels

Alexander Pope
An Essay on Man, An Essay on Criticism

William Blake - Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Shelley, Keats, and Byron

Charles Dickens
Charlotte Bronte
Robert Browning (1812–89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) were Victorian England's most famous poets,
This began with Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, from the 1870s, various plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) in the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde's (1854–1900) The Importance of Being Earnest.