LITERARY MOVEMENTS TIMELINE

A SHIFT IN THINKING AND TIME

 As with all human creative endeavors, literature takes place in a
chrono-contextual landscape; it cannot be separated from time, nor
should it.
 We are discussing Western literature, fictional writings that were
the catalyst for American literature. Other creative pieces have
been written in various cultures throughout time---obviously.
 No one living during the Renaissance said, “This whole
Renaissance thingy is awesome!” The attributed period title was
given many years later by astute, clever college professors who
needed to classify all periods, thus justifying their existence. In
short, it makes it easier to teach.

REMEMBER!
 The Classical Period is usually broken into two distinct periods—
Greek and Roman. Shocking I know.
 The Greek period lasted from 800 BCE to 400 BCE.
 Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey begin this period that created poetic
forms, defined drama, and produced mythology.
 The Roman Period lasted from 250 BCE to 150 CE.
 Divided into the Golden Age and Silver Age, this period would be one
of the most influential, forcing Latin into its prominence and
spawning a “rebirth” once the bubonic plague receded.
 Cicero’s curt, simple style would be
imitated for millennia.

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD

800 BCE—150 CE
 In its most familiar sense, classicism is associated with a knowledge of and
predilection for the literature, philosophy, art, and aesthetic taste of the
Ancient Greece and Roman cultures.
 As a critical term, classicism describes the espousal and teaching of art
embodying the virtues ascribed to these cultures: simplicity, clarity,
balance, unity, reason, and integrity.
 Aristotle creates these ideas in his Poetics: Drama should “be complete,”
“possess magnitude,” and “not begin by chance.”
 Cicero’s curt, simple style would be imitated for millennia.
 Elizabethan writers loved the Classics, especially Sir Philip Sydney who
wrote about the poet’s moral, civic, and didactic responsibilities in The
Defence of Poetry (1595).

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD

800 BCE—150 CE
 The landing of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in Britannia in 449 beget
an entirely new language, English, and a new country, Angla-land.
 The Jutes were Danish while the Angles and Saxons were German.
This is why German is still considered English’s parent language,
while Indo–European is the grandparent.
 The oldest surviving piece of literature in English is Beowulf.
 The copy held by the British Museum is dated around 1000, but we
know it was probably written around 800 based on its linguistic style,
diction, and settings.
 The period ended in the Battle of Hastings (1066)
with a French victory, which is extremely rare
from what I have heard. 

OLD ENGLISH
450—1100
 Since the self-proclaimed French king, William the Conqueror, subjugated the British
and created the “Doomsday Book,” which recorded all the taxes paid by his British
subjects, the French and British continued to battle.
 The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) culminated in a French victory because they were
led by Joan D’Arc, who subsequently was burned to death. The Pope said she was in
cahoots with the devil. What?
 Since William the Conqueror demanded all government documents be written in French,
the British loathed him.
 The British found their literary champion in Geoffrey Chaucer, who chose to write his
famous Canterbury Tales in English. Unfortunately, he dies in 1400. I wish he lived
forever: “The Miller’s Tale.”
 Everything changes when William Caxton imports the printing press to England in
1476. The first three books printed are The Bible, a book of chess strategy and rules,
and Canterbury Tales.

MIDDLE ENGLISH
1100—1500
 Shakespeare lived from 1564-1616. Was he
really that good?
 Yes. He wrote 37 plays in iambic pentameter.
Uh…that’s crazy.
 Samuel Johnson creates the British Dictionary
in 1755. It takes him almost ten years to
complete the task.
 Noah Webster Creates the American
Dictionary in 1806. (color=colour,
theater=theatre, gray=grey)

EARLY MODERN ENGLISH

1500—1800
 It began in Italy, but its philosophical ideas (social, political, scientific,
religious, artistic) spread quickly throughout Europe.
 Speaking of Cicero, some historians have attributed his humanistic
writings as the catalyst for this period. Petrarch venerated them.
 Although the English Renaissance occurs a bit later, it certainly had its
share of influential writers: William Shakespeare, Thomas More
(Utopia), John Milton (Paradise Lost), Christopher Marlowe (Doctor
Faustus), Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene),
Ben Jonson (The Alchemist), and John Donne
(“Death Be Not Proud” and “The Flea”).

THE RENAISSANCE
1500—1660
 Spurred on by the Renaissance writers’ love of Greco-Roman literature,
Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson revive Classicism.
It is historically referred to as The Restoration Period.
 In An Essay on Criticism (1711), Pope suggests the poet should imitate a
“natural order,” that which we know through reason and science, thereby
suggesting both form and content should take as their models the laws of
nature apprehended through study.
 Pope also advocated balance and restraint in both poetry and criticism,
which is why he wrote his essay in
Heroic couplets, two rhyming lines that are
end-stopped.

NEO-CLASSICAL PERIOD

[BRITISH]
1660—1785
 This adherence to balance and restraint would come under attack by the
English Romantics who succeeded the Neoclassicists.
 The later resurgence in classicism in the 20 th century was brought about
by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
 In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot suggests that being a poet
is about history: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his
relation to the dead poets and artists.”
 For Eliot, therefore, classicism must be sustained by familiarity with the
traditional canon.
 Do you agree?

NEO-CLASSICAL PERIOD
[BRITISH]
1660—1785
 In 1662 over 2,000 ministers and leaders in the Church of England were
forced to leave when an act of Parliament was passed which required
conformity to rules. Rather than compromise their consciences, they
left.
 They believed in the concept of original sin, limited atonement, and
irresistible grace.
 The Puritan writers had three functions: to transform a mysterious God
(mysterious because He is separate from the world), to make God more
relevant to the universe, and to glorify Him.
 The Puritan style of writing was considered plain and emphasized the
following: everyday language, simple sentences, and direct statements
that are free of ornate figures of speech, imagery, and classical allusions.

PURITANISM
1650—1750
 Puritan writing was protestant, purposeful, and reflective of the society’s
literacy.
 Common motifs in Puritan writing are idealism and pragmatism.
 Three famous Puritan writers are Anne Bradstreet, the first female poet
ever published in the US or England, Jonathan Edwards, and John Bunyan.
 Since they required all children to attend
school, in 1636, they opened a school
for post-secondary education.
 Yep, it’s Harvard.
 “Puritan” was a misnomer! Sex and alcohol
proved to be their downfall.

PURITANISM
1650—1750
 This literary period could be summed up by three words: deism, democracy,
and the American Dream.
 Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason (1793) proffers the relation between
deism (belief in the existence of one God based on the evidence of reason
and nature) and democracy (a form of government in which power is vested
in the people):
 “I Believe in one God, and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this
life. I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties
consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow
creatures happy…. I do not believe in the
creed professed by… [any church]. My own mind
is my own church.”

AGE OF REASON
1750—1800
Paine’s belief in the individual aligns him with one of the towering figures of
the period, Benjamin Franklin, whose Autobiography is among the most
important and influential works in American literature.
In it, Franklin creates the notion of the “Great American Dream,” in which an
individual, through hard work, thrift, ingenuity, and moral uprightness, can
rise from “rags to riches.”
Remember: This belief in the right of
individuals to determine their future
leads to the beginning of a new
country. Guesses?
That’s right. CANADA!
JK.

AGE OF REASON
1750—1800
 Although the completion of the dictionaries ended the life of Early Modern
English, it by no means curtailed English’s growth on the whole.
 With any living language, it is going to change, and, perhaps, looking at a
language over a long period of time, change a lot.
 Most words we shorten (math, [head nod], forrealdo), but we have also
elongated words (a pron=apron).
 However, most linguists agree—humans are lazy; some have even proposed
that eventually we will only have one vowel sound: the schwa (ә).
 From what segment of society do most of our new words come?
 Technology! Xerox, MP3, IPhone, etc.
 Who makes word changes or additions—common people or academia?
 The commoners, of course.

PRESENT DAY ENGLISH

1800—PRESENT
 In a historical sense, Romanticism was a movement of philosophy, politics, and the
arts that developed in France and Germany and flourished in England in the first
part of the 19th century.
 The most prominent historical event associated with Romanticism was the French
Revolution (1789-1799), which ended aristocratic rule and hereditary social
divisions in Europe.
 Romantic thinkers asserted the potential of men and women to be limited
neither by nature nor tradition.
 English writers associated with the period are William Blake, William Wordsworth,
S.T. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats.
 Romanticism is often associated with the primacy of imagination, the worship
of nature, and the use of natural imagery and symbolism
in mythmaking.

ROMANTICISM
[BRITISH]
1785—1830
 We get poems like Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Wordsworth’s “I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” and Shelly’s “Ode to the West Wind.”
 Many of the Romantics looked at the inner person, thus jilting the hypocrisy
and superficiality that lasted into and through the Victorian Period.
 One of the important works they discussed and somewhat venerated was
Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was a retelling of the Fall of Man: Adam and
Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the fallen angel Satan.
 The Romantics found the character Satan to be more human, with good and
bad qualities, than the other humans. The term Satanic hero means a
flawed, rebellious hero who regardless of hopeless odds battles against
others, fate, the universe, and perhaps even himself.

ROMANTICISM
[BRITISH]
1785—1830
 The term gothic was borrowed from an expressive style of architecture,
which developed in Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries. It was
characterized by pointed vaults and arches, steep roofs, stained windows,
and flying buttresses.
 The English Romantics of the late 18th century and early 19th centuries
came to think of this gothic style as awe-inspiring and mysterious. This
interest in the strangely beautiful and horribly thrilling gave rise to the
gothic story.
 By the time the American authors “grabbed” the gothic style, it became
synonymous with stories meant to frighten. Edgar Allan Poe and
Washington Irving are two such authors.

GOTHIC PERIOD
1785—1840
Typical Elements of American Gothic Fiction:
 1.  Since castles in the American landscape were practically unheard of, early Gothic fiction writers began
substituting the family estate, old houses that have been in the family for years, for the traditional castle.
 2.  An atmosphere of mystery and suspense that is enhanced by a plot which seeks to discover the secrets
lying within the supernaturally charged environment.
 3.  A ghostly legend, an unexplainable occurrence, or a story about a horrible death or murder that took place
at the family estate in question.
 4.  Omens, foreshadowing, and dreams usually play a large role in the mood created within the story.
 5.  Tales include highly charged emotional states like terror, insanity, anger, agitation, an exaggerated feeling
of some impending doom, and obsessive love.
 6.  Supernatural events:  ghosts, doors that open themselves, unexplained sounds, etc.
 7.  Damsels in distress are frequent.  Women who are frightened and confused, wandering around lost, or
dying due to a slow and unexplainable ailment.
 8.  Diction designed to evoke images of gloom and doom: dark, foreboding, ghostly, nefarious, etc.
 9.  Romantic themes often involve the death of a person in the throes of some great passion, the obsessive
nature of a man or woman in love, or excessive grief one feels upon the loss of a loved one.

GOTHIC PERIOD
1785—1840
 The period is named for Queen Victoria, who took over the throne of England
in 1837 at the age of 18. Her reign lasted until she died in 1901.
 Victoria’s reign was sandwiched by Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and
the beginning of World War I in 1914. This period of peace combined with the
prosperity brought on by the Industrial Revolution caused many Britons to
describe Victoria’s reign as the Golden Age of Great Britain.
 Imperialism, male hegemony, prudery, superficiality, and prostitution were
some of the problems associated with the society.
 The middle class prospered; thus, the overall literacy increased. Books were
being devoured, and the writers wrote for this class, particularly women.
 Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Oscar Wilde were just a
few writers from the period.

VICTORIAN PERIOD
[BRITISH]
1832—1901
 The Victorian period also coincides with what many scientists call the “Age of
Progress.” Science is at an all time interest to the public.
 Geologists study dinosaur fossils; Egyptologists study mummies; and Darwin
writes Origin of Species (1859).
 Four major concepts develop in science: 1. Evolution 2. Conservation of
energy 3. Space as a continuum that is pervaded by fields of physical activity
(electromagnetic fields) 4. “Action” is dependent on the existence of certain
basic units—atom in chemistry, cell in biology, and the quantum in physics.
 Although Queen Victoria dies in 1901, the “prosperity” continues until 1913.
After the onset of World War I, many Victorians begin to question the changes
brought about by rapid industrialization and expansive imperialism. This
obviously causes them to reevaluate their definitions of progress—and success .

VICTORIAN PERIOD
[BRITISH]
1832—1901
 Transcendentalism is the doctrine that suggests the principles of reality are to
be discovered by the study of the processes of thought, or a philosophy
emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical.
 They believe in a “return to nature” to clear the mind of life’s clutter. However, it
is to contemplate, meditate on one’s thoughts not on nature itself. Self-reliance is
central to self discovery.
 Henry David Thoreau (Walden) and Ralph Waldo Emerson are the two central
figures.
 This type of idealism was rejected by another group of American Romantics who
have been called antitranscendentalists. The works of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson often draw upon the history and theology
of Puritanism in America, but they undermine the absolutism of Puritan allegories
by introducing ambiguities and doubts.

TRANSCENDENTALISM
1840—1865
 Literary critics employ the term ‘realism’ to describe an approach to literature
which seeks to represent human experience as realistically and truthfully as
possible. Since the romantics and transcendentalists looked into the human mind
for answers, of course, there is a backlash, one in which writers suggested that
human thought is somewhat immeasurable but experiences are.
 Henry James in 1909 said, “The real represents to my perception the things we
cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another….The romantic
stands for the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all
the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know…”
 Novelists in the realist tradition seek to represent “the way things happen” by
means of mimesis: imitation of the actual.
 The most notable writer of this period is Mark Twain.

REALISM Henry
1865—1900 James
 The basic premise of naturalism is that the thoughts, emotions, and
actions of men and women are determined by forces beyond their
control: nature, heredity, and social forces.
 Novelists working on the assumptions of naturalism attempted to
achieve objectivity by presenting characters and actions with scientific
realism that avoided moral judgment.
 The sciences, such as Behaviorism (Pavlov, Skinner), Psychology
(Freud), Evolution (Darwin), and Genetics (Mendel), contributed heavily
to the idea that humans were at the mercy of fate, which suggested that
the Greeks had the right idea.
 Famous naturalist authors include Stephen Crane and Jack London.

NATURALISM
1901—1914
 The term modernism is commonly employed by historians and critics to designate an
international literary movement that gave rise to radical experiments in literary
technique.
 The central event for many of the “high” modernists—Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude
Stein, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats, among others—was World War I, which signified
for many artists and intellectuals a turning point in human history.
 The horrors of the First World War (1914—1918), during which Britain, France,
Germany, and Russia each suffered casualties of more than a million soldiers and civilians,
served to deepen the loss of faith in the old orders of Western civilization.
 It was also during this period that artists, literary and otherwise, began to express both
fascination with and alienation from the dramatic changes in human culture and technology
brought on by the prewar buildup, World War I itself, and its aftermath.
 W.B. Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” (1919), for example, announces the dissolution
of the old order and the birth of a new and barbaric age.

MODERNISM
Ezra
1914—1945 Pound
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The darkness drops again; but now I
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; know
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
cradle,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and And what rough beast, its hour come
everywhere round at last,
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; Slouches toward Bethlehem to be
The best lack all conviction, while the born?
worst
Are full of passionate intensity…..

MODERNISM
1914—1945
 Ezra Pound was one of the first to juxtapose ancient and modern culture, promulgating the
modernist credo “make it new,” that is, to re-create history and literature from a
modern perspective.
 In James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses (1922), for instance, the characters and action may be
understood to correspond loosely with Homer’s The Odyssey. Instead of telling about
Odysseus’s heroic exploits over ten years at sea, Joyce describes the ups and downs of a
middle-class and middle-aged Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, during the course of one day in
June 1904.
 The modernists flooded the past into the present by setting multiple allusions to earlier
works of literature, history, philosophy, and art against a contemporary context of cultural
decay and spiritual emptiness.
 They experimented with new styles and structures of poetry and prose. In many cases, they
abandoned traditional rules of syntax and continuity, offering instead fragments and
disordered narratives. Readers were expected to track down allusions and discover
hidden meanings in between the “parts.”

MODERNISM
1914—1945
 Human experience was often represented as nonlinear, relative,
and subjective, as Woolf notes in The Common Reader (1925): “Life
is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous
halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end.”
 Therefore, while a traditional novel followed Freytag’s Pyramid,
described characters in chronological settings, and asserted universal
themes, the “modern” novel sought to destroy these archaic notions,
thereby advocating personal themes created by a totality of experiences
in one’s life.

MODERNISM
1914—1945
 Although it was originally employed to designate styles of post-World War II
architecture, the word postmodernism is now widely used to define contemporary
culture and technology, as well as art.
 Broadly applied, postmodernism describes an age transformed by information
technology, shaped by electronic images, and fascinated by popular culture.
 Despite much discussion and debate about whether postmodernism is an extension of
modernism or a radical alternative to it, most critics and theorists agree that
postmodernist writers seem to favor the modernists’ experiments with technique while
rejecting their “elitism” or alienation from popular culture.
 In his essay entitled “Pluralism in Post-modern Perspective” (1986), Ihab Hassan
delineates a catena (chain of connected subjects) of postmodern theory and
experience. Among them he includes indeterminancy, fragmentation, decanonization,
selflessness, the unrepresentable, hybridization, carnivalization, and participation.

POST-MODERNISM Samuel
Beckett
1950—PRESENT
 Indeterminancy—growth of relativism, truth is subject to time, place, and context
 Fragmentation—inability to understand any process or system as a unified whole
 Decanonization—loss of faith in cultural, scientific, religious, and political authority
 Selflessness—what one thinks about one’s self is an illusion or misunderstanding that
one believes in order to avoid fears of nothingness and chaos
 The Unrepresentable—Mysteries like the presence of God or natural order are
treated as hopeless and hilarious fictions
 Hybridization—Violate and reject notions of boundaries between high and pop
culture
 Carnivalization—revel in absurdity, travesty, and parody
 Participation—A reader could or should revise postmodern texts into mere reflections
of one’s own needs or concerns
 Absurdism, existentialism, and deconstruction are all born.

POST-MODERNISM
1950—PRESENT
CREATED BY W. BRIAN BLANKENSHIP
2010, UPDATED 2015.