Assignment of Foundation of Literature

Putri Destyanti Choerunnisa
3B
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The Criteria for classification derive from fields such as the history of the language (Old and Middle English), national history (Colonial period)m politics and religion (Elizabethan and Puritan Age) and art (Renaissance and Modernism).

The following tables of the most important English and American Literary periods provide a preliminary overview before they are dealt with individually.

Periods of English Literature

Old English Period 5th-11th century
Middle English Period 12th-15th century
Renaissance 16th-17th century
Augustan Age 18th century
Romantic Period First half of 19th century
Victorian Age Second half of 19 th century
Modernism First to second world war
Post Modernism 1960s and 1970s

Periods of American Literature

Colonial or Puritan Age 17th-18th century
Romantic Period and Transcendentalism First half of 19th century
Realism and Naturalism Second half of 19th century
Modernism First to second World War
Postmodernism 1960s and 1970s



The Old English or Anglo-Saxon Period, the carliest period of English Literature, is regarded as beginning with the invasion of Britain by Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) tribes in the 5th century AD and lasting until the French Invasion under William the Conqueror in 1066.
When England was conquered by the French-Speaking Normans in the eleventh century, a definite rupture occured in culture and literature. From the later half of this Middle English Period, a number of texts from various literary genres have been preserved. The genres with religious contents, a new genre of a secular kind. Then Middle English Period also produced cycles of narratives.
The English Renaissance is also called the Early New English Period, a term which focuses on the history of the language, and the Elizabethan Age (Queen Elizabeth I) or Jacobean Age (King James), divisions based on political rule. Particularly notable in this period is the revival of classical genres, such as the Epic with Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and the drama with William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. The English Renaissance also produced relatively independent prose genres.
The next period which is commonly regarded as an independent epoch is the Eighteenth Century, which is also refered to as the Neoclassical, Golden or Augustan Age. In this period, classical literature and literary theory were adapted to suit contemporary culture. This was also a time of influential changes in distribution of texts, including the development of the nivel as a new genre and the introduction of newspapers and literary magazines.
Puritan or Colonial Age produced much of the literary writing in America in the seventeenth and Eighteenth century which is religiously motivated. Early American texts reflect, in their historiographic and theological orientation, the religious roots of American colonial times.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Romanticism marks the beginning of a new period in traditional English literary history. This period is a new period in which Nature and individual, emotional experience play an important role. Romanticism may be seen as a reaction to the Enlightenment and political changes throughout Europe and America at the end of the eighteenth century.

American Transcendentalism developed as an independent movement in the first half of nineteenth century. On this period, nature provides the key to philosophical understanding.
America and England generally followed the course of the most important international literary movements. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the representatives of Realism and Naturalism can be found in both centuries. While in the United States these trends manifest themselves mostly in fiction.
English and American Modernism can be seen as a reaction to the Reakist movements of the late nineteenth century. Modernism discovered innovative narrative techniques such as stream-of-conciousness or structural forms such as collage and literary Cubism.
In Postmodernism, modernist issues regarding innovative narrative techniques are taken up again and adapted in an academic, sometimes formalistic ways. Narratives techniques with multiple perspectives, interwoven strands of plot and experiments in typography characterize the texts of this era.
“Minority” Literature is literature written by marginalized groups including women, gays or ethnic minorities. These literature, sometimes return to more traditional narrative techniques and genres.
In addition to Women’s Literature, Postcolonial Literature has recently become another center of attention. This vast body of texts is also categorized under Commonwealth Literature, Literatures in English or Anglophone Literatures. Literature from former British colonies of the Carribean, Africa, India, or Australia have contributed to a change in contemporary literature.

This overview of the most important literary movements in English has only skimmed the surface of this wide and complex topic, leaving many authors unmentioned.