A QUICK TOUR TO THE WORLD LITERARY PERIODS
1.) HOMERIC/HEROIC PERIOD (1200-800 BCE)
• Greek legends were passed along orally, including Homer's The
Iliad and The Odyssey.
• This is a chaotic period of warrior princes, wandering sea-traders,
and fierce pirates.
• Homeric ideals include personal honor and honoring one's family
and friends, the importance of one's legacy or reputation, courage,
good morals, and physical strength.
2.) CLASSICAL GREEK PERIOD (800-200 BCE)
• The dominance of Greek writers, playwrights, and
philosophers include:
Gorgias, Aesop, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Euripides,
and Sophocles.
• This was the sophisticated era of the polis (individual City-
State) and early democracy. Some of the world's finest art, poetry,
drama, architecture, and philosophy originated in Athens.
3.) CLASSICAL ROMAN PERIOD (200 BCE-455 CE)
• This period produced an abundance of celebrated literature;
poetry, comedies, dramas, histories, and philosophical tracts.
However, Roman Literature cannot stand alone. They owe a debt
to their neighbor, the Greeks (more specifically Athens). It was
during (264 – 146 BCE) that Rome became involved in the
Macedonian Wars, eventually absorbing the Greek city-states.
• The Golden Age of Roman poetry (c. 70 BCE – 14 CE)
produced such memorable writers as Virgil, Horace, Catullus,
Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. They created a classical style
of writing comparable to many of the great Greek authors.
4.) PATRISTIC PERIOD (c. 70 CE-455 CE)
• This is the period when Saint Jerome first
compiled the Bible.
• Christianity spread across Europe
• The Roman Empire suffered its dying convulsions because
Barbarians attacked Rome in 410 CE, and the city finally fell to
them completely in 455 CE.
• The prominent themes emerged during this period are
religious principles and the belief systems of Europeans.
5.) THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD “The Dark Ages”
The so-called "Dark Ages" (455 CE -799 CE) occurred after Rome fell during the Classical Period and barbarian
tribes moved into Europe.
I. THE OLD ENGLISH (ANGLO-SAXON) PERIOD (428-1066 CE)
• While Anglo-Saxon poetry lacks a single, unifying
main theme, it commonly fuses themes from Germanic
pagan hero sagas—heroic deeds, strength of arms, blood
vengeance, etc. —with Christian ideals of forgiveness,
humbleness, charity, and heaven.
• Early Old English poems such
as Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer originated
sometime late in the Anglo-Saxon period.
II. THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD (c. 1066-1450 CE)
• In 1066, Norman French armies invaded and conquered England
under William I. This marks the end of the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and the emergence
of the Twelfth Century Renaissance (c. 1100-1200 CE).
• French chivalric romances, French fables, and great scholastic and
theological works were produced--such as the works of Marie de France and Jeun de
Meun, Abelard, and other humanists.
The prominent themes during the Medieval Period are language and voice, heroes and heroines, gender and
sexuality, myths, monsters, and the imagination, and faith and religion.
6.) RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION PERIOD
• This period in European history formed a bridge
between the Middle Ages and the modern era.
• This French period name which directly translates to
“rebirth” conventionally held to have been characterized
by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values.
• The main themes of literature during this period are
basically the “rebirth” of ALL themes: comedies, tragedies,
histories, Shakespeare’s life and world, gender, sexuality,
courtship and marriage, magic and the supernatural, and
the interpretations of “madness”.
• The “rebirth” of literature in this era happened after the fall
of Rome due to the Bubonic Plague and the great war with the
Barbarians
• Since there is a literal “rebirth” of literature, numerous
authors were noted worldwide such as William Shakespeare,
Dante Allighiere, Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio,
Don Quixote, Niccolo Machiavelli, Pretarch, and
Christopher Marlowe
After a long era of celebrated extravagance and acceptance of superstition and imagination, the world literature
transitioned to a time of an ‘awakening’.
7.) NEO-CLASSICAL PERIOD (1660-1790)
a.k.a. ‘The Enlightenment’
• "Neoclassical" refers to the increased influence of Classical literature upon these
centuries.
• The Neoclassical Period is also called the "Enlightenment" due to the increased
reverence for logic and disdain for superstition.
• Neoclassical literature is characterized by order, accuracy, and structure. In
direct opposition to Renaissance attitudes, where man was seen as basically good,
the Neoclassical writers portrayed man as inherently flawed. They emphasized
restraint, self-control, and common sense.
8.) VICTORIAN PERIOD (1832-1901 CE)
• Writings from the period of Queen Victoria's reign include
sentimental novels.
• British writers include Elizabeth Browning, Alfred Lord
Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens.
• While the novel was the dominant form of literature during
the Victorian era, poets continued to experiment with style and
methods of story-telling in their poems. Examples of this
experimentation include long narrative poems (epic poems)
and the dramatic monologue as seen primarily in the writing of
Robert Browning.
• In the Victorian Period, the family was a central unit in
Victorian society. The roles of each member of the family were
clearly defined. As a result of this, women were strictly
confined to domestic duties. They were expected to be austere,
delicate, and deferent to their husbands, fathers, and brothers. They could not inherit property. Hence,
there was also a domination of literary works by women.
• Since the printing technology was firmly established and
easy to replicate, the number of publications was on the rise.
Serialised publications became immensely popular as large groups
of people, including the newly emerged middle-class, subscribed
to periodicals.
9.) MODERN PERIOD (1901-1945 CE: The blow of the modern age was World War 1 and 2.)
• The century began with both great optimism and some fear
because it was the century closest to the start of a new millennium.
• Literary modernism gave authors more freedom to
experiment with their modes of expression than in the past.
• The period saw an abrupt break away from the old ways of
interacting with the world. In all the previous periods
experimentation and individualism were highly discouraged, but
with the onset of the modern period, both these things became
virtues.
• Hence, the main styles that are prominent during this period are: (1) The Process of Experimentation,
(2) Individualism, (3) Different Points of View, (4) Open-Verse, and (5) Creative Techniques.
10.) Post-Modern Period (circa -around- 1945-onwards)
If the people in the Modern Period tried to look for meanings and reorganization of things after the world
wars, people in the post-modern period embraced the disorganization, chaos, and imperfection instead.
Specifically;
1. Embrace of randomness. Postmodern works reject the idea of absolute meaning and instead embrace
randomness and disorder. Postmodern novels often employ unreliable narrators to further muddy the waters
with extreme subjectivity and prevent readers from finding meaning during the story.
2. Playfulness. While modernist writers mourned the loss of order, postmodern writers revel in it, often using
tools like black humor, wordplay, irony, and other techniques of playfulness to dizzy readers and muddle the
story.
3. Fragmentation. Postmodernist literature took modernism’s fragmentation and expanded on it, moving
literary works more toward collage-style forms, temporal distortion, and significant jumps in character and
place.
4. Metafiction. Postmodern literature emphasized meaninglessness and play. Postmodern writers began to
experiment with more meta elements in their novels and short stories, drawing attention to their work’s artifice
and reminding readers that the author isn’t an authority figure.
5. Intertextuality. As a form of collage-style writing, many postmodern authors wrote their work overtly in
dialogue with other texts. The techniques they employed included pastiche (or imitating other authors’ styles)
and the combination of high and low culture (writing that tackles subjects that were previously considered
inappropriate for literature).
PROMINENT WRITERS ARE:
Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace
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Web sources:
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PREPARED BY:
MS. BENNALYN APELADO, LPT
LIT 11 Instructor
