Literature Timeline

Date	Literary Period	Authors/Works
800-400 BC	This period was dominated by Homer and other Greek tragedians	The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer Oedipus the King by Sophocles Medea by Euripedes
250 BC - AD 150	Writers of the Roman Empire are most noted in this time period	Famous authors from this period: Virgil, Horace, and Ovid
450-1066	Old English (Anglo-Saxon)Period	Beowulf The rise of haiku poetry Tale of Genji by Japanese writer Murasaki Shibiku (written around the year 1000)
1066-1500	Middle English Period	Persian poet Rumi (1207-73) Petrarch, Italian writer, inventor of the sonnet (1304 -74) The Divine Comedy by Dante, Italian writer (1307-1321) The Decameron by Italian writer Boccacio (1313-75) The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer, British writer (1343-1400) 1450- Invention of the printing press
1500-1660	The Renaissance 558-1603 Elizabethan Age 1603- 1625  Jacobean Age 1625 - 1649 Caroline Age 1649 - 1669 Commonwealth Period	Francois Rabelais, French writer (1490-1553) Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, British writer (1564-93) William Shakespeare, British poet and playwright (1564-1616) Ben Johnson, British author (1572-1637) John Donne, British poet (1572-1631) The Faerie Queen (1589) by Edmund Spenser, British poet 1599 The Globe Theatre built Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish writer Andrew Marvel, British poet (1621-78) Henry Vaughan, British poet (1621-95) Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton, British author (1608-74)
1660-1785	The Neoclassical Period 1660-1700 The Restoration 1700-1745 The Augustan Age (Age of Pope) 1650-1750 Puritan/Colonial Literature (America)	Tartuffe (1664) by French writer Moliere (1622-73) Alexander Pope (1688-1744), British poet Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) by Daniel Defoe, English writer (1660-1731) Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, English writer (1667-1745) Candide (1759) by French writer Voltaire (1694-1778) Samuel Johnson, English writer (1709-84) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French writer and philosopher (1712-78) Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741) by American Jonathan Edwards he Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (first gothic novel) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German writer
1750-1800	The Age of Reason (America)	Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry, American Revolution authors Poems on Various Subjects (1773) by Phyllis Wheatley, African-American poet (1753-1784) Common Sense (1776) by Thomas Paine
1785-1830	The Romantic Period --The Gothic Period (approx. 1785-1820,  though it lasted longer in America)	William Blake, English poet (1757-1827) William Wordsworth, English poet (1770-1850) "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet (1772-1834) Jane Austen, English author (1775-1817) Lord Byron, English poet (1788-1824) Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet (1792-1822) John Keats, English poet (1795-1821) Alfred, Lord Tennyson, English poet, (1809-92) Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, British writer (1797-1851) The Last of the Mohicans (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper, American novelist (1789-1851)
1832-1901	The Victorian Period 1848-1860 The Pre-Raphaelites 1840-1860 Transcendentalism (America) 1865-1900 Age of Realism (America)	Edgar Allan Poe, American writer influenced by Gothic movement    (1809-49) Robert Browning, English poet (1812-89) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet (1806-61) Charles Dickens, British author (1812-1870) Emily Dickinson, American writer (1830-1886) Henry James, American writer (1843-1916) Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte, British writer (1816-55) Wuthering Heights (1848) by Emily Bronte, British writer (1818-48) The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne, American writer Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville, American writer Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau, American essayist Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) Les Miserables (1862) by Victor Hugo, French writer Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray, English novelist Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert, French writer Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott, American author Middlemarch (1872) by George Eliot (a.k.a. Marian Evans), British writer Paul Lawrence Dunbar, American poet (1872-1906) A Doll's House (1879) by Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian dramatist (1828-1906) Huckleberry Finn (1885) by American writer Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane, American author (1871-1900) The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin, American writer The Yellow Wallpaper (1899) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, American writer Leaves of Grass (1900) by Walt Whitman, American poet
1901-1914	The Edwardian Period (Europe) Naturalism (America)	Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad, Polish/British author (1857-1924) The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W.E.B. Dubois, American writer The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London, American writer, (1876-1916) Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton, American writer (1862-1937)
1914-1945	The Modern Period	"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) by T.S. Eliot, American writer Robert Frost, American poet (1874-1963) Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet (1892-1950) My Antonia (1918) by Willa Cather, American writer (1873-1947) Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson, American writer The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, American writer (1896-1940) The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway, American writer (1899-1961) As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner, American writer (1897-1962) Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck, American writer (1902-1968) Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston, American writer (1891-1960) Langston Hughes, American poet (1906-67) The Glass Menagerie (1945) by Tennessee Williams, American playwright (1911-1983) Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell, British writer (1903-1950) The Stranger (1946) by Albert Camus, French writer (1913-1960)
1950 -	Post Modernism	The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D.Salinger, American writer (1919) Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison, American writer (1914-1994) The Crucible (1953) by Arthur Miller, American playwright (1915-) Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury, American author (1920-) Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding, British author (1911-1993) Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956) by Eugene O'Neill, American playwright (1888-1953) On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac, American writer (1922-69) Night (1958) by Elie Wiesel, Romanian-American (1928-) Catch 22 (1961) by Joseph Heller, American writer  (1923-) A Separate Peace (1962) by John Knowles, American writer (1926-) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey, American author (1935-2001) The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath