Literary History and Periods: Chronology and Markers
This domain tests chronology and the ability to recognise a period from its stylistic and intellectual markers. Questions ask you to date a text approximately, place it in a movement, and justify the placing from features in the passage.
Anchor dates
- Old English: to 1066. Middle English: 1066 to about 1500.
- Renaissance and Elizabethan: sixteenth century; Jacobean drama follows after 1603.
- Restoration: from 1660, comedy of manners and wit.
- Augustan and neoclassical: earlier eighteenth century, satire, couplets, decorum.
- Romantic: from Lyrical Ballads, 1798, to about 1830.
- Victorian: 1837 to 1901. Modernist: about 1910 to 1945. Postmodern and contemporary: after 1945.
- Indian writing in English runs from nineteenth-century poets such as Toru Dutt, through the 1930s novelists, to post-1980 fiction.
Markers to look for
- Romantic: imagination, common speech, rural solitude, the sublime, the isolated self.
- Victorian: industrial city, doubt and faith, social reform, dramatic monologue.
- Modernist: fragmentation, allusion, interiority, mythic method, distrust of plot.
Worked example
A poem dated 1798 praises imagination, uses rural solitude in plain language, and ends on a sense of the sublime. Place it in the Romantic period and link it to Lyrical Ballads. Justify with three features rather than the date alone, because the date is often withheld in the exam.
Traps that cost marks
- Reading Romantic as romantic, meaning love.
- Placing modernism in the nineteenth century.
- Mixing Restoration comedy with Victorian fiction.
- Assuming Indian English writing begins after 1947.