Literary Periods, Major Works and Authors

Question 1

Romanticism

Answer 1

a

Question 2

Metaphysical Poetry

Answer 2

a

Question 3

Shakespearean or Elizabethan Sonnets

Answer 3

a

Question 4

Lyrics or Ballad

Answer 4

a

Question 5

Petrarchan Sonnet

Answer 5

a

Question 6

Romantic Poetry

Answer 6

a

Question 7

Realism

Answer 7

a

Question 8

Romance Literature

Answer 8

a

Question 9

The Enlightenment

Answer 9

a

Question 10

Naturalism

Answer 10

a

Question 11

Neoclassicism

Answer 11

a

Question 12

Gary Paulsen

Answer 12

Young Adult.

Question 13

Harlem Renaissance

Answer 13

s

Question 14

Dating and major writers of: the Old English Period.

Answer 14

428-1066 (Fall of Rome to Norman Invasion)

Early Old English poems such as Beowulf, The Wanderer, Caedmon’s Hymn and The Seafarer originate sometime late in the Anglo-Saxon period.

Question 15

Dating and major writers of: the Middle English Period.

Answer 15

1066-1485 CE (Norman Invasion to Renaissance)

Geoffrey Chaucer, the “Gawain” or “Pearl” Poet, the Wakefield Master, and William Langland.

Question 16

Dating and major PERIODS of: the Renaissance.

Answer 16

1485-1660 CE (Renaissance to Enlightenment)

Early Tudor
Elizabethan 
Jacobean
Caroline Age
Commonwealth Period

Question 17

Dating and major writers of: the Early Tudor Period.

Answer 17

1485-1558: Henry VIII and Schism from Rome.

Edmund Spenser major poet.

Question 18

Dating and major writers of: the Elizabethan Period.

Answer 18

1558-1603

The early works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kydd, and Sidney mark Elizabeth’s reign.

Question 19

Dating and major writers of: the Jacobean Period (James I)

Answer 19

1603-1625

Shakespeare’s later work, Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, and John Donne.

Question 20

Dating and major writers of: the Caroline Age (Charles I).

Answer 20

1625-1649

John Milton, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, the “Sons of Ben” and others write during the reign of Charles I and his Cavaliers.

Question 21

Dating and major writers of: the Commonwealth Period.

Answer 21

1649-1660

John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Browne.

Question 22

Dating and major PERIODS of: the Enlightenment/Neoclassicism.

Answer 22

1660-1790

Restoration Period
Augustan Age
Age of Johnson/Colonial Period

“Neoclassical” refers to the increased influence of Classical literature upon these centuries. The Neoclassical Period is also called the “Enlightenment” due to the increased reverence for logic and disdain for superstition. The period is marked by the rise of Deism, intellectual backlash against earlier Puritanism, and America’s revolution against England.

Question 23

Dating and major writers of: the Restoration Period.

Answer 23

1660-1700

John Dryden, John Lock, Sir William Temple, Samuel Pepys, and Aphra Behn.

This period marks the British king’s restoration to the throne after a long period of Puritan domination in England. Its symptoms include the dominance of French and Classical influences on poetry and drama.

Question 24

Dating and major writers of: the Augustan Age.

Answer 24

1700-1750

Addison, Steele, Swift, and Alexander Pope.

This period is marked by the imitation of Virgil and Horace’s literature in English letters.

Question 25

Dating and major writers of: the Age of Johnson/Colonial Period.

Answer 25

1750-1790

In the UK: Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and Edward Gibbon who represent the Neoclassical tendencies, while writers like Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Cowper, and Crabbe show movement away from the Neoclassical ideal.

In the American Colonies: Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

This period marks the transition toward the upcoming Romanticism though the period is still largely Neoclassical. Major writers include In America, this period is called the Colonial Period.

Question 26

Dating and major writers of: Romanticism.

Answer 26

1790-1830

Coleridge, Blake, Keats, and Shelley in Britain and Johann von Goethe in Germany. Jane Austen also writes at this time, though she is typically not categorized with the male Romantic poets.

Romantic poets write about nature, imagination, and individuality in England. Mirrored by Transcendentalism in the USA.

Question 27

Dating and major writers of: Gothicism.

Answer 27

1790-1890

Overlap with the Romantic and Victorian periods. Writers of Gothic novels (the precursor to horror novels) include Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and Victorians like Bram Stoker in Britain. In America, Gothic writers include Poe and Hawthorne.

Question 28

Dating and major writers of: Transcendentalism.

Answer 28

1830-1850

Emerson and Thoreau

Transcendentalism mirrors Romanticism in Europe in its concerns and style.

Question 29

Dating and major writers of: the Victorian Period.

Answer 29

1832-1901

Elizabeth Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and the Brontë sisters.

Question 30

Aestheticism:

Answer 30

a literary and artistic movement that flourished in England in the 1880s, devoted to “art for art’s sake” and rejecting the notion that art should have a social or moral purpose. Its chief exponents included Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and Aubrey Beardsley.

Question 31

Naturalism

Answer 31

The name “Naturalism” was given to a 19th-century artistic and literary movement, influenced by contemporary ideas of science and society, that rejected the idealization of experience and adopted an objective and often uncompromisingly realistic approach to art. Notable figures include the novelist Zola and the painter Théodore Rousseau.

Question 32

Modernism

Answer 32

1914-1945?)
In Britain, modernist writers include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Wilfred Owen. In America, the modernist period includes Robert Frost and Flannery O’Connor as well as the famous writers of The Lost Generation (also called the writers of The Jazz Age, 1914-1929) such as Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. “The Harlem Renaissance” marks the rise of black writers such as Baldwin and Ellison. Realism is the dominant fashion, but the disillusionment with the World Wars lead to new experimentation.

Question 33

Postmodernism

Answer 33

1945 onward

T. S. Eliot, Toni Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard, Fowles, Calvino, Ginsberg, Pynchon, and other modern writers, poets, and playwrights experiment with metafiction and fragmented poetry. Multiculturalism leads to increasing canonization of non-Caucasian writers such as Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neal Hurston. Magic Realists such as Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Günter Grass, and Salman Rushdie flourish with surrealistic writings embroidered in the conventions of realism.

Question 34

Realism

Answer 34

While realism in art is often used in the same contexts as naturalism, implying a concern to depict or describe accurately and objectively, it also suggests a deliberate rejection of conventionally beautiful or appropriate subjects in favor of sincerity and a focus on simple and unidealized treatment of contemporary life. Specifically, the term is applied to a late 19th-century movement in French painting and literature represented by Gustave Courbet in the former and Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert in the latter.