English literature

Introduction & Top Questions
The Old English period
- Poetry
  - Alliterative verse
  - The major manuscripts
  - Problems of dating
  - Religious verse
  - Elegiac and heroic verse
- Prose
  - Early translations into English
  - Late 10th- and 11th-century prose
The early Middle English period
- Poetry
  - Influence of French poetry
  - Didactic poetry
  - Verse romance
  - The lyric
- Prose
The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods
- Later Middle English poetry
  - The revival of alliterative poetry
  - Courtly poetry
  - Chaucer and Gower
  - Poetry after Chaucer and Gower
    - Courtly poetry
    - Popular and secular verse
    - Political verse
- Later Middle English prose
  - Religious prose
  - Secular prose
- Middle English drama
- The transition from medieval to Renaissance
The Renaissance period: 1550–1660
- Literature and the age
  - Social conditions
  - Intellectual and religious revolution
  - The race for cultural development
- Elizabethan poetry and prose
  - Development of the English language
  - Sidney and Spenser
  - Elizabethan lyric
  - The sonnet sequence
  - Other poetic styles
  - Prose styles, 1550–1600
- Elizabethan and early Stuart drama
  - Theater and society
    - Theatres in London and the provinces
    - Professional playwrights
    - Marlowe
  - Shakespeare’s works
    - The early histories
    - The early comedies
    - The tragedies
    - Shakespeare’s later works
  - Playwrights after Shakespeare
    - Jonson
    - Other Jacobean dramatists
    - The last Renaissance dramatists
- Early Stuart poetry and prose
  - The Metaphysical poets
    - Donne
    - Donne’s influence
  - Jonson and the Cavalier poets
  - Continued influence of Spenser
  - Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose
  - Prose styles
  - Milton
The Restoration
- Literary reactions to the political climate
  - The defeated republicans
  - Writings of the Nonconformists
  - Writings of the royalists
- Major genres and major authors of the period
  - Locke
  - Chroniclers
  - Diarists
  - The court wits
  - Dryden
  - Drama by Dryden and others
The 18th century
- Publication of political literature
  - Journalism
  - Major political writers
    - Pope
    - Thomson, Prior, and Gay
    - Swift
    - Shaftesbury and others
- The novel
  - The major novelists
    - Defoe
    - Richardson
    - Fielding
    - Smollett
    - Sterne
  - Other novelists
- Poets and poetry after Pope
  - Burns
  - Goldsmith
  - Johnson’s poetry and prose
The Romantic period
- The nature of Romanticism
- Poetry
  - Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
  - Other poets of the early Romantic period
  - The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
  - Other poets of the later period
- The novel: From the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
- Discursive prose
- Drama
The post-Romantic and Victorian eras
- Early Victorian literature: The age of the novel
  - Dickens
  - Thackeray, Gaskell, and others
  - The Brontës
- Early Victorian verse
  - Tennyson
  - Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  - Arnold and Clough
- Early Victorian nonfiction prose
- Late Victorian literature
  - The novel
  - Verse
- The Victorian theater
- Victorian literary comedy
The 20th century
- From 1900 to 1945
  - The Edwardians
  - The Modernist revolution
    - Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot
    - Celtic Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid
  - The literature of World War I and the interwar period
  - The 1930s
  - The literature of World War II (1939–45)
- Literature after 1945
  - Fiction
  - Poetry
  - Drama
The 21st century

References & Edit History Related Topics

Images, Videos & Interactives

Illuminated manuscript page showing Geoffrey Chaucer riding a horse, dressed in dark robes, with ornate decorative borders and Gothic script text from the Canterbury Tales.

English poet and monk John Lydgate with pilgrims

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Learn about women's contributions to English literature during the 16th and 17th centuries

Nicolaus Copernicus: heliocentric system

Uncover the linguistic influence of King James Bible on English literature

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene

Engraving of the Globe Theatre

Historical map of London around 1600 highlighting the locations of major theatres such as The Globe, The Rose, The Swan, The Fortune, and The Curtain, along with city walls, administrative areas, halls, and other buildings used as theatres. The map shows the River Thames at the bottom and marks notable city features, streets, and neighborhoods, with theatres indicated by red squares.

Related Questions

Beowulf — Beowulf Beginning of the Beowulf manuscript.

English literature

Written by

Nicholas ShrimptonAll

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

Last updated

Sep. 26, 2026 •History

English literature, the body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of the British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century to the present day. The major literatures written in English outside the British Isles are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature, Canadian literature, and New Zealand literature. English literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian...

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