A Brief Timeline of Literature

An idiosyncratic overview of English history for American students of literature.
Ancient--The Decline of the Roman Empire.  The English language is spoken but not written in the lands in and near western Germany.  The people of Britain are Celts, but the Angles and Saxons and Danes will later overpower them (from whom we get English, "Angle-ish").  The English are developing runes, but our language is not yet alphabetized.  The Latin language is being introduced first through the Roman rulers, then through the missionary work of Christians (who also spoke Latin).  Through the monks, we have copies of some ancient English poems, legends, and myths.  They would copy English tales, songs, etc. that they heard into Latin when they weren't copying Bibles (or, sometimes, they'd write a story in the margin, etc.).  Rome loses its first major battle to the Visigoths in A.D. 376 at Adrianople and is first sacked in 410.  AD--500 1000 Old English (Anglo-Saxon); early medieval; still, most scholarly work is done in Latin, but great kings such as Alfred the Great would inspire a resurgence of English (rather than exclusively Latin) culture.  English is now written using Latin letters rather than runes.			Moses (Hebrew Bible), Gilgamesh, Sophocles, Euripides, David, Solomon, Ezra, Nehemiah, Plato, Septuagint (Greek) Bible, Homer, Aristotle, The Vedas (Hinduism), Gautama (Buddhism), Confucius, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Virgil, mystery cults, Herod, Jesus the Christ who is Lord, Paul, John, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Augustine, Jerome's Vulgate (Latin Bible), Constantine I, Mythologies and  Legends in every culture.  Christian councils and creeds established.  Patrick, Beowulf, Muhammad (Islam), King Arthur, Caedmon, Bede, Charlemagne, Alfred the Great, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Fairytales...; East and West Schism in the Church
1000-1500 Middle English; late medieval; 1066 and the battle of Hastings is most significant, for here the English are conquered by the Normans (Duke William) and our language adds a great deal of French to it.  The French also bring their culture and learning, establishing Cambridge and Oxford as our first universities.  Hence, more Latin.  The Italian Renaissance is like a great earthquake whose epicenter is Florence, Italy in the late 14th century.  Most western nations experience some kind of rebirth of the arts and Classical culture by the 17th century.			Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri (three great men of Tuscany), Geoffrey Chaucer (the Father of English Poetry), William of Ockham, First English Printing: William Caxton prints his translation of A History of Troy England in 1471, Wycliffe (First English Bible)
1500-1660 The English Renaissance; the War of the Roses; Roman Catholic and Protestant Church division
1500-1558	Tudor Period	Humanist Era; Early English Renaissance	Henry VIII, Thomas More, John Skelton, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, William Tyndale (First Printed English Bible);
1558-1603	Elizabethan Period	High Renaissance; England fends off the Spanish Armada	Edmund Spenser,  Cervantes, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare (greatest English playwright)
1603-1625	Jacobean Period, American Colonial Period Begins	Mannerist Style (1590-1640) other styles: Metaphysical Poets; Devotional Poets	Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, The King James Bible (Greatest English Bible), Ben Jonson, 1607 Jamestown Colony (America), 1620 Pilgrims, Aemilia Lanyer, Jonathan Edwards
1625-1649	Caroline Period	Beheading of Charles I	Thomas Cromwell, Milton
1649-1660	The Commonwealth & The Protectorate	Baroque then Rococo styles	Marvell, Milton, John Bunyan's Pilgrim'
1660-1700	The Restoration	Charles II enthroned	Milton, John Dryden
1700-1800	The Neoclassical Period or Age of Johnson, Our Founding Fathers and American Independence	The Enlightenment; The Augustan Age	Alexander Pope, Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson (1st English novel Pamela in 1740), Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson (first great English dictionary), George Washington (1798, 1st American President), Ben Franklin, John Adams
1785-1830	Romanticism, American Transcendentalism	The Age of Revolution; American Expansion into the Midwest	Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Jane Austen, Longfellow, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, the Brontës, American English Forming
1830-1901	Victorian Period, American Realism	British Empire at its Zenith; American Civil War; "Manifest Destiny"	Irving,  Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Alfred  Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Matthew Arnold, Tolstoy, Twain
1901-1942 (or some say 1960)	Modern Period, WWI and WWII	The Edwardian Era (1901-1910); The Georgian Era (1910-1914); Modernism; faith in self through systems	Theodore Roosevelt (26th President), G.M. Hopkins,  G.K. Chesterton (best essayist), Hilaire Belloc, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Connor
1942 (or 1961)--	Contemporary (and some say Postmodern)	Faith in self alone.	Greene, Lessing, Wendell Berry, Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, Borges, Stephen King, Roald Dahl