| Old English (428-1100) | Figures: Beowulf
Works: Caedmon's "Song," Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy |
| Anglo-Norman (110-1350) | Works: Poema Morale, King Horn, The Play of St. Catherine, Cursor Mundi, The Pickle of Conscience
Historical Events: 12 Magna Carta, Feudalism |
| Middle English (1350-1500) | Figures: Wycliffe, Malory, Chaucer
History: Plague, Peasant Revolt |
| Renaissance (1500-1660) | Figures: Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton
History: Printing, English rise as world power |
| Neoclassic (1660-1798) | Figures: Dryden (prose), Milton, Bunyan, Pope, Gray, Burns, Johnson
Works: Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress |
| Romantic (1798-1870) | Figures: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley (Frankenstein Shelley and port Shelley), Keats, Scott, Jane Austen, Lamb
History: Celtic Renaissance/Revival, Napoleonic Wars, Industrial Revolution |
| Realistic (1870-1914 [WW1]) | Figures: Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Rupert Kipling, William Yeats, Ibsen, Gilbert & Sullivan, Arnold, Huxley, Pater, Spencer, Stevenson, George Eliot, Hardy, Wells,
History: British Imperialism, Scientific Revolution |
| Modern/Modernist (1914-1965 [WW 2]) | Figures: Galsworthy, Wells, Forster, Conrad, Maugham, Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, Mansfield, Shaw, Coward, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Hopkins, Thomas
Works: Ulysses |
| Post-Modernist/Contemporary (1965-present) | Figures: Greene, Kingsley, Lessing, Fowles, Larkin, Pinter, Stoppard |
