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A Timeline of World Literature |
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A Timeline of World Literature |
Cultural Contexts |
Date |
Literary Contexts |
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| Old Kingdom Period in Egypt | c. 2575-2130 BCE | Earliest extant fragments of Egyptian poetry composed during this period |
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| Reign of Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) | 1364-47 BCE | Akhenaten's "Hymn to the Sun" composed |
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Composition of Mahãbhãrata | |
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| c. 397-95 BCE | Composition of The Apology of Socrates | |
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| After 355 BCE | Composition of Aristotle's Poetics | |
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Rome annexes Palestine to its Empire |
190 BCE |
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Composition of Bhagavad Gîtâ | |
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1385-1400 CE |
Composition of The Canterbury Tales |
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Fall of Constantinople--Greek Migration to Western Europe |
1453 ff. CE |
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| Martin Luther Nails the Ninety-Five Theses to the Door of the Wittenberg Cathedral | 1517 CE | |
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1564-1616 CE |
William Shakespeare |
French Wars of Religion |
16th Century CE |
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| 1608-74 CE | John Milton | |
| Founding of Jamestown | 1609 CE | |
| Pilgrims Land at Plymouth Massachusetts | 1620 CE | |
| English Civil War & The Commonwealth | 1640-1660 CE | |
Ming Emperor Fu rules in Nanking |
1644-45 CE |
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1648-1718 CE |
K'ung Shang-jen, author of The Peach Blossom Fan |
Sir Isaac Newton formulates the Laws of UniversalGravitation |
1666 CE |
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1667 CE |
Publication of Paradise Lost |
United Kingdom of England and Scotland Created |
1707 CE |
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| Bach's The Brandenberg Concertos | 1721 CE | |
1726 CE |
Publication of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1677-1745) |
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1733-34 CE |
Publication of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) |
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The American War of Independence |
1775-83 CE |
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| 1781-88 CE | Jean Jacques Rousseau publishes Confessions | |
The French Revolution Begins |
1789 CE |
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1798 CE |
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge publish Lyrical Ballads |
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Thomas Jefferson purchases Louisiana |
1803 CE |
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Battle of Waterloo |
1815 CE |
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1817-20 CE |
John Keats' Active as a Poet |
1827 CE |
Heine Publishes Book of Songs |
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Victoria Crowned Queen of the United Kingdom |
1837 CE |
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1842 CE |
Tennyson Ulysses |
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Marx Publishes The Communist Manifesto |
1848 CE |
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Ghalib Becomes Court Poet to the Moghol Emperor |
1855 CE |
Whitman Publishes Leaves of Grass |
Baudeliare and His Publisher are Fined for Publishing Les Fleurs de Mal |
1857 CE |
Baudelaire Publishes The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs de Mal) |
Darwin Publishes Origin of Species |
1859 CE |
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American War between the States |
1861-65 CE |
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Invention of the Telephone |
1876 CE |
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1886 CE |
Death of Emily Dickinson and discovery of handmade fascicles of her poetry that she apparently prepared |
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1890 CE |
Emily Dickinson's Poems Published Posthumously |
1893 CE |
Freud Publishes On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena (often considered thefirst psychoanalytic text) |
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c. 1897-1902 |
Washington Matthews Collects Versions of Navajo Oral Literature |
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| Boer War in South Africa | 1899-1902 CE | |
| 1902 CE | Joseph Conrad publishes Heart of Darkness | |
| Wright Brothers at Kittyhawk, NC | 1903 CE | |
| Foundation of International Workers of the World (IWW), beginning of modern labor movement | 1905 CE | Freud Publishes Dora |
| 1913 CE | Marcel
Proust publishes Swann's Way. Thomas Mann publishes Death in Venice |
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| First World War; Einstein formulates the general theory of relativity (1915 CE) | 1914-18 CE | James Joyce publishes Dubliners (1914) & Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916); Franz Kafka's The Metamorphoses published posthumously (1916). |
| The Harlem Renaissance (1921-29 CE) | 1920's CE | Knud Rasmussen collects Inuit songs (1921-24 CE); |
| 1923 CE | Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Elegies | |
| American stock market crash signals the beginning of worldwide economic crisis; Greta Depression lasts until 1937 | 1929 CE | |
| 1933-37 CE | Pablo Neruda Residence on Earth | |
| 1935-47 CE | Kawabata Yasanuri Snow Country | |
| World War II | 1939-45 CE | |
| 1942 CE | Albert Camus The Stranger | |
| 1944 CE | Jorge Luis Borges The Garden of Forking Paths | |
| 1947 CE | Birago Diop Tales of Amadou Koumba | |
| Creation of Isreal | 1948 CE | Ezra Pound Pisan Cantos; Tadeusz Borowski Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber |
| Korean War | 1950-53 CE | Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man (1952) |
| Crick and Watson discover DNA | 1953 CE | |
| Einstein dies. | 1955 CE | Alain Robbe-Grillet The Voyeur |
| 1956-57 CE | Naguib Mahfouz The Cairo Trilogy | |
| 1958 CE | Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart | |
| 1967 CE | Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude | |
| Neil Armstrong makes one small step for [a] man and one giant leap for mankind. | 1969 CE | |
| 1975 CE | Wole Soyinka Death and the King's Horseman | |
| 1988 CE | Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses |