| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Greek/Hellenistic | authors include Homer, Sophocles, Euripedes; notable works include 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey' |
| Roman | authors include Virgil, Horace, Ovid; notable works: 'The Aeneid' and 'Metamorphoses' |
| Old English/Anglo-Saxon | an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century; works such as 'Beowulf;' rise of haiku poetry |
| Middle English/Medieval | period in history which lasted for roughly a millennium, commonly dated from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century to the beginning of the Early Modern Period in the 16th century; authors include Dante, Chaucer; works include 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,' 'The Canterbury Tales,' and 'The Divine Comedy' |
| Renaissance | a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century; authors include Erasmus and More |
| Age of Enlightenment | used to describe a time in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority; includes authors such as Jefferson, Washington, Franklin |
| Puritan/Colonial Literature | a time of individual freedom and political independence; authors such as Bradstreet, Smith, Winthrop |
| Age of Reason | includes authors such as Jefferson, Paine, Henry; notable work: 'Common Sense' |
| Transcendentalism | a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century; include authors such as Emerson and Thoreau; notable work: "Self-Reliance" and "Civil Disobedience" |
| Romanticism | a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution; authors include Poe, Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Byron Shelley, and Pushkin |
| Victorian | a second English "Renaissance" with expansion of wealth, power, and culture; authors include Tennyson, Dickens, Bronte, Norton, and Browning |
| Age of Realism | truthful representation of reality of common, contemporary (often middle class) life or "verisimilitude;" authors include Chopin, Tolstoy, Dickinson, and Longfellow |
| Naturalism | a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment; authors include London, Steinback, Crane, and Wharton |
| Modernism | modern thought, character, or practice; authors include Pound, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joyce |
| Postmodernism | literally means 'after the modernist movement;' authors include Salinger, Bradbury, Kerouac, Plath, and Angelou |
| Existentialism | a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point for philosophical thought; authors include Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka |
| Restoration | began in 1660 when the English monarchy, Scottish monarchy and Irish monarchy were restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the English Civil War; authors include Defoe, Swift, Pope |
| Neoclassicism | given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture (usually that of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome) |
| Sentimentalism | an overindulgence in emotion, especially the conscious effort to induce emotion in order to enjoy it; authors include Austen, Bode, and Stern |
| World War I | also known as the First World War, Great War and War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved the majority of the world's great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Entente Powers and the Central Powers: authors include Owens, Yeats, and Eliot |
| World War II | a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all of the great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis; authors include Beckett, Achebe, Miller |
| Revolutionary War | a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen united former British colonies on the North American continent, and ended in a global war between several European great powers |
| Industrial Revolution | a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transportation had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain; authors include Engels and Lord Ashley |
| French Revolution | a period of political and social upheaval and radical change in the history of France, during which the French governmental structure, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, underwent radical change to forms based on Enlightenment principles of citizenship and inalienable rights; notable authors Rousseau, Voltaire, and Paine |
| Feminist Movement | a social and political movement that sought to establish equality for women; "Roe vs. Wade;" notable authors Walker, Cather, and Plath |
| Harlem Renaissance | refers to the flowering of African American cultural and intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s; includes authors Hurston, Hughes, and Cullen |
| Elizabethan Era | is associated with Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558–1603) and is often considered to be the golden age in English history; authors include Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Spenser |
| Augustan Age | is a style of English literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the first half of the 18th century, ending in the 1740s with the deaths of Pope and Swift (1744 and 1745, respectively) |
| Protestant Reformation | a Christian reform movement in Europe; notable authors include Calvin and Luther |
| Civil War | also known as the War Between the States and several other names, was a civil war in the United States of America; notable authors include Douglass, Stowe, Chestnut, and Lincohn |
| Aestheticism | loosely defined movement in literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design in later nineteenth-century Britain; used slogan "Art for Art's Sake;" authors include Wilde, Keats, and Rosetti |
| Southern Literature | is defined as American literature about the Southern US or by writers from this region; characteristics include a focus on a common history, the significance of family, a sense of community and one's role within it, the region's dominant religion and the burdens/rewards religion often brings, issues of racial tension, land and the promise it brings, a sense of social class and place, and the use of the Southern dialect; authors include Twain, O'Connor, Gaines, and Gibbons |
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