Ages in English literature

0450 - 1066: Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period

Major Writers:

Beowulf (Anonymous)

1066 - 1500: Middle English Period

Major Writers:

Geoffrey Chaucer

1500 - 1600: The Renaissance (Early Modern) Period

1558 - 1603: Elizabethan Age

Major Writers:

Christopher Marlowe

Edmund Spenser

Francis Beaumont

John Fletcher

Sir Philip Sidney

Thomas Dekker

Thomas Wyatt

William Shakespeare

1603 - 1625: Jacobean Age

Major Writers:

Ben Jonson

John Webster

Thomas Kyd

George Chapman

John Donne

George Herbert

Emilia Lanyer

1625 - 1649: Caroline Age

Major Writers:

John Ford

John Milton

1649 - 1660: Commonwealth Period

Major Writers:

John Milton

Andrew Marvell

Thomas Hobbes

1660 - 1700: Restoration Period

Major Writers:

John Dryden

1700 - 1745: The Augustan Age

Major Writers:

Alexander Pope

Jonathan Swift

Samuel Johnson

1745 - 1783: The Age Of Sensibility

1785 - 1830: The Romantic Period

Major Writers:

William Wordsworth

S.T. Coleridge

Jane Austen

the Brontës

1832 - 1901: The Victorian Period

Major Writers:

Charles Dickens

George Eliot

Robert Browning

Alfred Lord Tennyson

1848 - 1860: The Pre-Raphaelites

Major Writers:

William Holman Hunt

John Everett Millais

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

William Michael Rossetti

James Collinson

Frederic George Stephens

Thomas Woolner

1880 - 1901: Aestheticism and Decadence

1901 - 1910: The Edwardian Period

Major Writers:

J. M. Barrie

Arnold Bennett

Joseph Conrad

E. M. Forster

John Galsworthy

Kenneth Grahame

Edith Nesbit

Beatrix Potter

Lucy Maud Montgomery

H. G. Wells

P. G. Wodehouse

1910 - 1914: The Georgian Period

Major Writers:

G.M. Hopkins

H.G. Wells

James Joyce

D.H. Lawrence

T.S. Eliot

1914 - 1945: The Modern Period

Major Writer

James Joyce

Mikhail Bulgakov

T. S. Eliot

Virginia Woolf

John Steinbec

D. H. Lawrence

Ezra Pound

William Faulkner

Ernest Hemingway

Katherine Anne Porter

E. M. Forster

Franz Kafka

Joseph Conrad

W. B. Yeats

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Samuel Becket

Robert Frost

1945 - Present: Post Modern Period

Major Writers:

Ted Hughes

Doris Lessing

John Fowles

Don DeLillo

A.S. Byatt