📚 COMPLETE BRITISH LITERATURE – HANDWRITTEN-STYLE NOTES

(UGC NET Friendly + Timeline + Key Facts)

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📝 OLD ENGLISH PERIOD (450–1066)

Key Features:

• Heroic poetry, war culture, oral tradition

• Pagan + Christian blend

• Alliterative verse

Major Works:

• Beowulf – Anonymous (Epic)

• Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

• The Dream of the Rood

Important Authors:

• Caedmon

• Cynewulf

• King Alfred (translations)

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📝 MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD (1066–1500)

Key Features:

• Norman influence

• Rise of narration, romance, and religious literature

• Development of English as literary language

Major Authors & Works:

• Geoffrey Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales

• William Langland – Piers Plowman

• *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Pearl Poet)

• John Gower

• Mystery & Morality Plays: Everyman, Mankind

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📝 RENAISSANCE / EARLY MODERN PERIOD (1500–1660)

1. Elizabethan Period (1558–1603)

Features:

• Humanism

• Revival of learning

• Drama flourishes

Writers:

• William Shakespeare – tragedies, comedies, histories

• Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus

• Edmund Spenser – The Faerie Queene

• Philip Sidney – Astrophel and Stella

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2. Jacobean Period (1603–1625)

Features:

• Darker themes

• Revenge tragedies

Writers:

• John Webster – The Duchess of Malfi

• Ben Jonson – Volpone

• Francis Bacon – Essays

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3. Caroline Period (1625–1649)

Writers:

• John Ford – Tis Pity She’s a Whore

• Cavalier Poets – Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace

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4. Commonwealth / Puritan Age (1649–1660)

Features:

• Drama closed

• Religious prose

Writer:

• John Milton – Paradise Lost, Areopagitica

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📝 RESTORATION & 18th CENTURY (1660–1798)

Restoration (1660–1700)

• Comedy of Manners

• Heroic tragedy

  Writers:

• Dryden – Absalom and Achitophel

• Aphra Behn – Oroonoko

18th Century / Augustan Age

Features:

• Satire

• Rise of the novel

• Rationality

Writers:

• Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels

• Alexander Pope – The Rape of the Lock

• Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe

• Samuel Richardson – Pamela

• Henry Fielding – Tom Jones

• Dr. Johnson – Dictionary (1755)

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📝 ROMANTIC PERIOD (1798–1837)

Features:

• Imagination

• Nature

• Emotion

First Generation:

• Wordsworth – Prelude

• Coleridge – Kubla Khan

Second Generation:

• Byron – Don Juan

• Shelley – Ode to the West Wind

• Keats – Odes

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📝 VICTORIAN PERIOD (1837–1901)

Features:

• Industrialization

• Morality

• Realism

Novelists:

• Charles Dickens – Hard Times

• George Eliot – Middlemarch

• Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Poets:

• Tennyson – In Memoriam

• Browning – Dramatic monologues

• Arnold – Dover Beach

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📝 MODERN PERIOD (1901–1945)

Features:

• Fragmentation

• Stream of consciousness

• WWI & WWII influence

Writers:

• James Joyce – Ulysses

• Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway

• T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land

• W.B. Yeats – Symbolism

• D.H. Lawrence – Psychological novels

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📝 POSTMODERN PERIOD (1945–Present)

Features:

• Metafiction

• Intertextuality

• Identity crisis

• Playfulness

Writers:

• Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children

• Julian Barnes – Flaubert’s Parrot

• Angela Carter – The Bloody Chamber

• Zadie Smith – White Teeth