Important Things to Cover

British Literature
Anglo-Saxon Age
• Background
 Hadrian Wall
 Germanic Tribes
 Four Dialects – Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, West Saxon
 King Alfred
 The Dane Law
 Literary Characteristic of age
 Literary devices used- alliteration, kenning, caesura
 Four Old English Poetic Codices
• Writers
 Bede
 Caedman (Anglo-Saxon Milon)
 Cynewulf

Anglo Norman Period

• Background
 Norman conquest
 Changes came after Battle of Hasting
 Domesday Book
 Influence on English Language
 Assassination of Thomas Beckett (1170)
 Crusades
 Birth of Universities (Medieval Learning based on 7 liberal arts)
 Magna Carta
• Literature and Writers
 3 Matters of Medieval Romance
 Bayeux Tapestry
 Name of works by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon
 Pearl Poet
 The Owl and the Nightingale
 Mystery play
 Miracle Play

Age of Chaucer & Age of Revival

• Background
  Hundred Years War (Basic Info, Battle of Crecy, Battle of Poitiers, Battle of
Navarrete, Battle of Agincourt & 3 demands of Henry V, Siege of Orleans)
 The Famine (1315-17)
 The Black Death (1348)
 The Peasant Revolt (1381)
 Western Schism (1378-1417)
 Cade’s Rebellion
 Lollard Movement
 Morality Plays
• Writer
 Chaucer (Very Important)
 Wycliff
 Thomas Wyatt
 William Caxton & 1st printed literature (Imp.)
 Thomas More’s Utopia
 Thomas Malory
 William Tyndale

Renaissance
• Background
 Church of England
 Renaissance Movement
 Theatre’s in Elizabethan Age
 Spanish Armada
 Babington Plot
• Writers
 Edmund Spenser
 Philip Sidney
 University Wits (Name of Authors & their prominent works)
 Christopher Marlowe (Imp.)
 William Shakespeare (Very Imp.)
 Thomas Kyd
 Francis Bacon
 Walter Raleigh

Puritan Age
• Background
 Fire at Globe
 Poetomachia (War of Theatres)
 Civil Wars
 Comedy of Humours
 Spenserian Poets
  Cavalier Poets
 Metaphysical Poets
• Writers
 Beaumont & Fletcher
 Ben Jonson (Imp.)
 John Webster (Imp.)
 Thomas Middleton
 George Chapman
 John Marston
 Thomas Heywood
 Andrew Marvell (Imp.)
 George Herbert
 John Donne (Imp.)
 John Milton (Imp.; Paradise Lost – very imp.)
 Henry Vaughan
 Robert Herrick
 Thomas Carew
 Robert Lovelace
 John Suckling
 John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
 Thomas Browne
 Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

Restoration Age
• Background
 Feature of restoration literature (Comedy of Manners, Heroic Drama)
 Great Fire of London (1666)
 Popish Plot (1678)
• Writers
 John Dryden
 William Congreve
 Aphra Bhen
 John Gay
 Samuel Bulter’s Hudibras
 John Locke
 Samuel Pepys’ Diary
 Jeremy Collier
 Thomas Rymer
 George Etherege’s works title

Neo-Classical Age
• Background
  Why Augustan Age? Why Age of Reason? Why Enlightenment Age?
 Rise of novels & Periodicals
 Chronology of Periodicals
 Graveyard Poets
 Literature of Sesibility
• Writers
 Alexander Pope (Very Imp.)
 Johnathan Swift (Imp.)
 Richard Steel & Joseph Addison
 Dr. Samuel Johnson (Very Imp.)
 Thomas Gray (Imp.)
 Oliver Goldsmith (Imp.)
 William Blake (Imp.)
 Robert Burns (Imp.)
 Laurence Sterne (Imp.)
 Daniel Defoe (Imp.)
 Henry Fielding (Imp.)
 Samuel Richardson (Imp.)
 Immanuel Kant
 William Cowper (Imp.)

Romantic Age
 Whole age is important
 11396 definitions of romanticism by F L Lucas in The Decline and Fall of the
Romantic Ideal (1948)
 Jane Austen, Romantic Poets are very imp.

Victorian Age
 Historical background (very imp.)
 Literary clubs of this age
• Writers
 Lord Alfred Tennyson
 Robert Browning
 Charles Dickens (Very Imp.)
 Bronte Sister (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is imp.)
 William Makepeace Thackrey
 Matthew Arnold
 Oscar Wilde
 George Eliot
 Thomas Hardy
 John Ruskin
 John Henry Newman
  G.M Hopkins
 Elizabeth Gaskell
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Modern Age
 Literary trends of the age
• Writers
 T.S Eliot (Very Imp.)
 Ezra Pound
 G.B Shaw
 John Galsworthy
 Joseph Conrad
 Graham Greene
 Rudyard Kipling
 E.M Foster
 D.H Lawrence
 Virginia Woolf
 George Orwell
 James Joyce
 H.G Wells
 W.H Auden
 W.B Yeats

Post-Modern Age
 Characteristics and Literary groups & movements
• Writers
 Eugene O’Neill
 Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot is very Imp.)
 Harold Pinter (The Birthday Party is very imp.)
 Tom Stoppard
 John Osborne
 William Golding
 Angela Carter
 Ian McEwan
 Doris Lessing
 Jeanette Winterson
 Agatha Christi
 Philip Larkin
 Ted Hughes
 Seamus Hughes