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History of English Literature — The Ages Timeline

📚 Literature · ⏱️ 8 min read · Updated June 2026

The ages at a glance

Age	Period	Anchor name
Old English (Anglo-Saxon)	450–1066	Beowulf (epic)
Middle English / Age of Chaucer	1066–1500	Chaucer — Canterbury Tales
Elizabethan / Renaissance ("Golden Age")	1558–1603	Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser
Jacobean → Restoration	1603–1700	Milton; Dryden
Neoclassical / Augustan	1700–1798	Pope, Swift, Dr Johnson
Romantic Age	1798–1837	Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley
Victorian Age	1837–1901	Tennyson, Dickens, Hardy, Arnold
Modern Age	1901–1945	T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Joyce
Postmodern / Contemporary	1945–present	Beckett, Golding, Indian English writers

💡 Memory anchor: 1798 (Lyrical Ballads) opens the Romantic Age; 1837 (Victoria's accession) opens the Victorian; 1901 (her death) opens the Modern. Three dates pin the whole 19th-20th-century map.

What each major age is "about"

Renaissance — rebirth of learning, humanism, the flowering of drama & the sonnet.
Neoclassical / Augustan — reason, order, satire and the heroic couplet (Pope).
Romantic — emotion, nature, imagination, the common man and the individual.
Victorian — morality, industrial society, the novel's golden age, doubt vs faith.
Modern — fragmentation, stream of consciousness, disillusion after the World Wars.

The "Father of…" list

Title	Writer
Father of English Poetry	Geoffrey Chaucer
Father of English Criticism	John Dryden
Father of the English Essay	Francis Bacon
Father of English Novel	Henry Fielding (also Daniel Defoe)
Father of English Tragedy	Christopher Marlowe
Poet's Poet	Edmund Spenser
Bard of Avon	William Shakespeare

हिन्दी: "Father of…" और date-anchors — ये दो list लगभग हर literature paper में marks दिलाती हैं। रट लो।

Researched references: UP PGT English Syllabus 2025 (Adda247)

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← Back to all study notes · Notes by Dr Pankaj Tiwari, English Lecturer & Author.