IMPORTANT WRITERS CHRONOLOGICALLY (UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL)

Many of the Literature students like me might have faced this almost hilarious situation, I am sure. When anyone asks you which subject are you majoring in and you happen to tell them English Literature the first thing that the other person says is “ Oh! William Shakespeare”, Now indeed Shakespeare was one of the greatest playwrights across centuries, but it is important to note that he was not the only one. There were innumerable others.

Literature is deeper and vaster than ocean. It is not possible to read every work or to know every writer. But, in this blog I will share the list of major writers which every student pursuing English Literature should know.

ANGLO SAXON AGE

This was the oldest age when literature was oral. There are only few written records. Most of the Universities do not include this portion in the syllabus, but apart from studying the syllabus, you should know these writers :-

1) Caedmon

2) Cynewulf

3) Geoffrey of Monmouth

MEDIEVAL AGE

1. Chaucer
2. William Langland
3. John Wycliffe

AGE OF REVIVAL

1. Thomas Wyatt
2. Earl of Surrey
3. William Caxton
4. Sir Thomas Malory

ELIZABETHAN AGE

1. Edmund Spenser
2. Philip Sidney
3. Christopher Marlowe
4. William Shakespeare
5. Ben Jonson
6. Francis Bacon

PURITAN AND RESTORATION AGE

1. John Donne
2. Andrew Marvell
3. John Milton
4. John Dryden
5. George Etherage
6. William Wycherley
7. William Congreve
8. Samuel Pepys

NEO-CLASSICAL OR AUGUSTAN AGE

1. Alexander Pope
2. Dr. Samuel Johnson
3. Thomas Gray
4. Oliver Goldsmith
5. Jonathan Swift
6. Daniel Defoe

ROMANTIC AGE

1. William Blake
2. William Wordsworth
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
4. Robert Southey
5. George Gordon Byron
6. Percy Bysshe Shelley
7. John Keats
8. Jane Austen
9. Walter Scott
10. Thomas Dequincey 

VICTORIAN AGE

1. Alfred Lord Tennyson
2. Robert Browning
3. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
5. Christina Rossetti
6. Charles Dickens
7. George Eliot
8. Elizabeth Gaskell
9. The Bronte sisters ( Charlotte, Emily, Ann)
10. William Makepeace Thackeray
11. Willkie Collins
12. Robert Louis Stevenson
13. Thomas Carlyle
14. John Ruskin
15. Walter Peter

MODERN AGE AND POST MODERN AGE

Modern Age and the Post Modern Age had been a revolutionary age in the History of English Literature. It is an age of experimentation and there are a lot of major writers.

1) William Butler Yeats

2)  Alfred Noyes

3) Siegfried Sassoon

4) Thomas Stearns Eliot

5)  WH Auden

6)  Stephen Spender

7) Walter de La Mare

8)  John Masefield

9) Dylan Thomas

10)  Lady Gregory

11) George Bernard Shaw

12) John Galsworthy

13) Sean O’ Casey

14) Samuel Beckett

15) John Osborne

16) Harold Pinter

17) Joseph Conrad

18) Rudyard Kipling

19) HG Wells

20) Arnold Bennet

21) EM Forster

22) James Joyce

23) Virginia Woolf

24) DH Lawrence

25) George Orwell

26) Graham Greene

27) Kathrine Mansfield

28) JB Priestely

29) Walt Whitman

30) Ted Hughes

31) Sylvia Plath

32) Edgar Allan Poe

33) Robert Frost

34) Leo Tolstoy

There are also other writers which you can research about and read. But these are the major writers you should know about. This list is a combined list of essayists, diarists, novelists, poets, playwrights etc.