Jonathan Swift

- satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet;

- Enlightment writer;
- period: Augustan Age;
- best known for satirical allegories;
- ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, ‘The battle of the books’, ‘A Tale of
a Tub’

Mark Twain
- American writer;
- genres: historical fiction, non-fiction, essay, satire,
philosophical literature, children’s literature;
- shaped the frontier spirit in his novels;
- ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, ‘The adventures of Tom
Sawyer’, ‘A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court ’.

George Gordon Byron

- British poet;
- leading figure in Romanticism;
- brief poems: ‘She walks in beauty’, ‘Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage’, ‘Don Juan’, ‘So, we’ll go no more a’roving’

Ernest Hemingway
- American novelist, short-story writer;
- genres: war, romance;
- literary movement: The Lost Generation;
- introduced the camera point of view;
- novels: ‘The old man and the sea’, ‘For whom the bell tolls’;
short story: ‘The short happy life of Francis Macomber’.

James Joyce
- Irish novelist and poet;
- literary movement: Modernism, Imagism;
- employed stream of consciousness;
- ‘Dubliners’, ‘A portrait of an artist as a young man’, ‘Ulysses’,
‘Finnegans Wake’
 Edgar Allan Poe
- American poet and short-story writer;
- literary movement: Romanticism;
- genres: gothic literature, horror, crime and detective fiction;
- great creator of atmosphere;
- tales: ‘The black cat’, ‘The fall of the house of Usher’, ‘The tell-
tale heart ’, ‘The murders in the Rue Morgue’; poems: ‘The raven’

Charles Dickens
- English novelist;
- period: Victorian era;
- notable works: ‘David Copperfield’, ‘Great Expectations’, ‘The
Bleak House’.

William Shakespeare
- English poet and playwright, in the Elizabethan Age; creation time: 1590-1613;
- creator of the blank verse and Elizabethan sonnets;
- works: 38 plays: tragedies(‘Hamlet’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’), comedies
(‘A midsummer night’s dream’), chronicles( ‘Richard II’, ‘Henry VI’), romance (serene)
plays (The Tempest’) and 154 sonnets( themes: love, friendship, beauty, ‘The dark lady
of the sonnets’).

George Bernard Shaw

- Irish playwright;
- literary movement: Reformist Socialist;
- genres: satire, black comedy;
- best known for the play ‘Pygmalion’
- different outlook on historical characters in ‘The devil’s disciple’,
‘Caesar and Cleopatra’

Thomas Hardy
- English poet, novelist and short-story writer;
- Naturalist movement;
- main theme: the implacable destiny;
- ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, ‘The return of the native’, ‘Jude the
Obscure ’.
 Geoffrey Chaucer
- English author, poet, philosopher;
- Middle English Period;
- works: ‘The Canterbury Tales’( frame story, the first psychological
portrait, language and topic adapted to all walks of life);
- ‘he found the English language brick and left it marble’.

Eugene O’Neill
- American playwright;
- introduced the techniques of realism;
- inovative plays: ‘The mourning becomes Electra’, ‘Ah, wilderness!’
(the only comedy), ‘Strange interlude’.