An outline of the British Literature: writers and their work

An outline of the British Literature

Old English (Anglo-Saxon Period)
writers: Caedmon and Cynewulf.
work: Beowulf (by anonymous).

1200-1500: Middle English Period 
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) :
The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Book of the Duchess.  
Other Major Poems 
The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowles, The Legend of Good Women. Prose Treatises Treatise on the astrolabe. Short Poems The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse ,Truth, Gentilesse, Merciles Beaute, Lak of Stedfastnesse, Against Women Unconstant. 

Thomas Malory (1405-1471) : 
Morte d'Arthur.
work: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (by anonymous).

1500-1660: The English Renaissance 1500-1558: Tudor Period (Humanist Era)  
The Humanists:

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) :
Utopia, The History of King Richard the Third, The Life of Pico della Mirandola, The Four Last Things, A Dialogue Concerning Tyndale, The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation and Sadness of Christ.

John Skelton (1460-1529): 
A ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge 

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542): 
My Lute Awake! Once, As Methought, Fortune Me Kissed They Flee From Me The restful place ! renewer of my smart It may be good, like it who list In faith I wot not what to say There Was Never Nothing More Me Pained Patience ! though I have not Though I Cannot Your Cruelty Constrain Blame Not My Lute My Pen ! Take Pain The heart and service to you proffer'd Is It Possible? And Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus? Since so ye please to hear me plain Forget Not Yet The Tried Intent What Should I Say!


The Renaissance Period consists of four subsets:
1. 1558-1603: The Elizabethan Age (High Renaissance)

William Shakespeare (1564-1616):
Comedies: All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Winter's Tale
Histories: King John, Richard II, Henry IV, part 1, Henry IV, part 2, Henry V, Henry VI, part1, Henry VI, part 2, Henry VI, part 3, Richard III,Henry VIII
Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra.Poems: Shakespeare's Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, The Phoenix and the Turtle, A Lover's Complaint.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593): 
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus The Jew of Malta Massacre at Paris Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 Tamburlaine the Great, Part 2 Lucan's First Book Edward II Dido Queen of Carthage Hero and Leander Ovid's Elegies The Passionate Shepherd to his Love 

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599):
The Faerie Queene, Iambicum Trimetrum, The Shepheardes Calender.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552 – 1618): 
What is Our Life, The Ocean to Cynthia and The Lie.

Ben Jonson (1573-1637): 
An Hymn to God the Father An Hymn on the Nativity of My Savior An Epitaph on Master Vincent Corbet On the Portrait of Shakspeare To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare To Mr. John Fletcher, Upon His "Faithful Shepherdess" Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke Epitaph on Michael Drayton To His Much and Worthily Esteemed Friend, the Author To My Worthy and Honored Friend, Master George Chapman

2. 1603-1625:The Jacobean Age {Mannerist Style (1590-1640) other styles: Metaphysical Poets; Devotional Poets}

John Donne (1572-1631): 
Song A Hymn to God the Father Death, Be Not Proud Confined Love The Dissolution Oh my black soul! now art thou summoned Father, part of his double interest A Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): 
The Advancement of Learning, The Essays, The New Atlantis, Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627): 
The Phoenix Michaelmas Term A Mad World, My Masters A Trick to Catch the Old One The Puritan 

3.1625-1649: The Caroline Age : John Ford, John Milton 

John Milton (1608-1674): Lycidas, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained

 John Ford (1586-1640): Fame's Memorial Christ's Bloody Sweat, attr. Honour Triumphant The Witch of Edmonton The Sun's Darling The Lover's Melancholy Contention of a Bird and a Musician The Broken Heart A Bridal Song Love's Sacrifice 'Tis Pity She's a Whore Perkin Warbeck The Fancies, Chaste and Noble The Lady's Trial 

4. 1649-1660: The Commonwealth Period (which is also known as the Puritan & The Protectorate Baroque Style, and later, Rococo Style) 
The Neoclassical Period: political writings of John Milton, Thomas Hobbes' political treatise Leviathan, and the prose of Andrew Marvell. 


Andrew Marvell (1621-1678): 
To his coy mistress 

The Neoclassical Period can be divided into three subsets: 
1. 1660-1700: The Restoration:  
John Milton (1608-1674): 
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.  

John Dryden (1631-1700), 
John Wilmot 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), satirical poet
John Locke
  
2. 1700-1800: The Eighteenth Century (The Enlightenment; Neoclassical Period; The Augustan Age) 
The Augustan Age:

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, (first English novels by Defoe) 

Samuel Richardson, Pamela 

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): 
An Essay on Criticism The Rape of the Lock The Dunciad 

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): 
A Modest Proposal 
Gulliver's Travels 
Lady´s Dressing room 
Strephon and Chloe 
Cassinus and Peter 

 3. The Age of Sensibility.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) 
Tom Jones. 

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784): 
A Dictionary of the English Language 
To the Right Honorable the Earl of Chesterfield

1785-1870: Romanticism (The Age of Revolution) 
William Blake, William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Jane Austen. 

William Wordsworth (1770-1850):
 London 1802
 Ode: Intimations of Immortality
 The Prelude 
To a Skylark 
Tintern Abbey 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834): 
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 
Chrisabel 
Kubla Khan 

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824):
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 
Don Juan Song for the Luddites 
The Isles of Greece 

Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialogue
Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude
Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit 
The Daemon of the World
Mont Blanc
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty 
Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A           Vision of the Nineteenth Century
The Revolt of Islam, A Poem, in Twelve Cantos
History of a Six Weeks' Tour

Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility 
Pride and Prejudice 
Mansfield Park 
Emma 
Northanger Abbey 
Persuasion 

1870-1914: Victorian Period (Early, Middle and Late Victorian) Charles Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870): 
Great Expectations 
Hard Times 
The Old Curiosity Shop 
Dombey and Son 
A Tale of Two Cities
 Oliver Twist 

George Eliot (1819-1880): 
Middlemarch 
The mill on the floss
George Eliot

Robert Browning (1812-1889):
The Ring and the Book 
My Last Duchess 


1914-1945: Modern Period


George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): 
Candida 
Pygmalion 
An Unsocial Socialist Arms and the Man 
Caesar and Cleopatra
 The Irrational Knot 
Cashel Byron's Profession

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939): 
The Island Of Statutes Iris 
Fairy Tales 
On Baile' Strand 
The Hour Glass 
In The Seven Woods 
The Kings Treshold 
Reveries Over Childhood And Youth Responsibilities 
Sailing To Byzantium
 The Second Coming 
At The Hawk's Well 

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930):
 Sons and Lovers 
Everlasting Flowers Elegy
 Discord in Childhood 
Dolor of Autumn
 Excursion
 Lady Chatterley's Lover 
Women in Love 

T.S.Eliot (1888-1965): 
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 
Gerontion Sweeney Among the Nightingales 
The Waste Land 
The Hollow Men 
The Journey of the Magi 
Ash Wednesday