Eras in English literature are often identified by a mix of categories, with their beginnings and endings marked by historical events (e.g. the Norman invasion in 1066) or by reigns (e.g., Elizabethan or Victorian) or by artistic movements (e.g., modernism). Sometimes resources are named simply by centuries. This brief table should help you identify year ranges of eras.
| Era | Years | Examples* |
|---|---|---|
| Old English or Anglo-Saxon | c450-1066 | Beowulf, Caedmon's Hymn |
| Middle English, Medieval, or Anglo-Norman | 1066-1500 | Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight |
| Renaissance or Early Modern (often split into Elizabethan, Jacobean, and late) | 1500-1660 | William Shakespeare, The King James Bible, Robert Herrick |
| Restoration | 1660-1700 | John Milton, Aphra Behn, John Dryden |
|
18th Century (or Age of Reason), often divided into Augustan and Age of Sensibility |
1700-1798 |
Augustan: Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift
Age of Sensibility: Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Anne Radcliffe, Jane Austen |
| Romantic (also early 19th C. or Regency) | 1798-1837 | William Blake, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Samuel Coleridge, Jane Austen, John Keats, Washington Irving |
| Victorian | 1837-1901 | George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman |
| Modernist | 1901-c1939 | Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats, J.M Synge, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Ralph Ellison |
| Postmodern & Post-colonial, sometimes also contemporary or Post-45 | c1940- | Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, George Orwell, Muriel Spark, Colm Tóibín, Tom Stoppard, Paul Muldoon, Katherine Mansfield, R.K. Narayan, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, Anne Carson |
*These examples (and year ranges) are meant to be illustrative, not authoritative or absolute. There are many debates about the upper and lower limits of literary eras, and who belongs where.
