Periods

Question 1

The Renaissance (1500 - 1660)

Answer 1

Context: Political instability, intellectual/religious revolutions (e.g., separation from Rome), voyages of discovery, humanism, and classical antiquity revival.

Developments: Printing press, patron system, theatre as a mass medium.

Key Figures/Genres:

• Theatre: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster
• Essays & Utopias: Francis Bacon, Thomas More.
• Love Poetry: Sidney, Spenser, Donne
• World Epics: John Milton

Question 2

Restoration and Neo-Classicism (1660–1780)

Answer 2

Context: Civil War, Enlightenment, rise of the bourgeoisie.

Literary Features: Focus on reason, satire, and moral didacticism.

Genres: Newspapers (e.g., The Spectator), satire, realist and anti-realist novels.

Key Figures/Works:

• Satire: Swift’s Gulliver, Alexander Pope.
• Novels: Defoe, Richardson, Walpole
• Drama: Dryden, Wycherley

Question 3

Romantic Period (1780–1830)

Answer 3

Context: Revolutions (French, Industrial), focus on imagination over reason.

Features: Celebration of nature, emotions, and individualism.

Key Genres: Poetry, novels.

Key Figures/Works:

• Poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats.
• Novels: Austen, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

Question 4

Victorian Age (1830–1901)

Answer 4

Context: Industrialization, empire expansion, social change.

Features: Dominance of the novel, serialization, themes of morality, and progress.

Key Figures/Genres:

• Novels: Dickens, Brontë sisters ,Eliot
• Poetry: Tennyson, Browning.
• Drama: Wilde

Question 5

Modernism (1900–1945)

Answer 5

Context: World Wars, technological/scientific progress, breakdown of traditional structures.

Features: Experimentation with form and narrative, exploration of alienation.

Key Figures: Virginia Woolf James Joyce, Eliot, Orwell, Lawrence, Huxley

Question 6

Postmodern Period (1945–present)

Answer 6

Context: Skepticism, relativism, rejection of grand narratives.

Features: Intertextuality, pastiche, fragmented identities.

Key Figures:

• Poetry: Plath, Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, Ann Duffy
• Drama: Beckett, Stoppard, Churchill, Kane
• Prose: Burroughs, Fowles, Pynchon, Rushdie, Byatt, Palahniuk, Atwood, Fielding