This timeline gives a chronological listing of the main literary periods and popular works of literature
Medieval – 500 CE – 1500 CE
c. 731
Ecclesiastical History of England – The Venerable Bede
c.1000
Beowulf – unknown
c. 1050
The Song of Roland – unknown
1320
Divine Comedy – Dante
1351
Decameron – Boccaccio
1386
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Renaissance 1500 – 1670
1516
Utopia – Thomas More
1590 – 1614
Complete Works – William Shakespeare
1590
The Faerie Queene – Edmund Spencer
1592
Dr Faustus – Christopher Marlowe
1605
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
1667
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Neo-Classicism – 1660 – 1798
1664
Tartuffe – Moliere
1712
The Rape of the Lock – Alexander Pope
1719
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Enlightenment – 1700 – 1800
1726
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
1733
Poor Richard’s Almanack – Benjamin Franklin
1750
Encyclopedie – Denis Diderot
1759
Candide – Voltaire
1762
Emile – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Romantic Period – 1798 – 1870
1807
Daffodils – William Wordsworth
1818
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
1824
Don Juan – Lord Byron
1834
Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1850
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
1851
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Victorian Period – 1837 – 1901
1838
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
1847
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
1847
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
1849
In Memoriam – Alfred Lord Tennyson
1855
Men and Women – Robert Browning
1861
Silas Marner – George Eliot
1891
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Realism – 1860 – 1920
1866
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1872
Middlemarch – George Eliot
1884
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Modernism – 1910 – 1965
1913
Sons and Lovers – D H Lawrence
1922
The Wasteland – T S Eliot
1925
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
1929
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemmingway
1939
Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce
Existentialism – 1915 – Present Day
1915
The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
1938
Nausea – Jean-Paul Satre
1942
The Stranger – Albert Camus
1949
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
Post Modernism – 1945 – Present Day
1973
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
1991
American Psycho -Bret Easton Ellis
First published 2016; updated and republished Nov 13 2021 @ 7:23 pm – Updated – [last-modified]
Harvard Reference for this page:
Heather Y Wheeler. (2016 – 2022). Literary Periods and Works 733 to Present Day.