* Homer (8th century BC)
* Virgil (1st century BC)
* Ovid (1st century AD)
* Medieval literature:
* Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century)
* Dante Alighieri (13th century)
* William Langland (14th century)
* Renaissance literature:
* William Shakespeare (16th/17th centuries)
* Edmund Spenser (16th century)
* Christopher Marlowe (16th century)
* Enlightenment literature:
* Voltaire (18th century)
* Rousseau (18th century)
* Montesquieu (18th century)
* Romantic literature:
* William Wordsworth (19th century)
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge (19th century)
* John Keats (19th century)
* Realist literature:
* Gustave Flaubert (19th century)
* Charles Dickens (19th century)
* Leo Tolstoy (19th century)
* Modernist literature:
* James Joyce (20th century)
* T.S. Eliot (20th century)
* Virginia Woolf (20th century)
* Postmodernist literature:
* Salman Rushdie (20th/21st centuries)
* Margaret Atwood (20th/21st centuries)
* Don DeLillo (20th/21st centuries)