Periods

Dividing literary history into periods is always a tricky matter, because cultural change never happens all at once. In other words, people didn’t wake up on 1 January 1500 and suddenly change their habits from medieval to Renaissance. Besides, literary and cultural movements rarely coincide with century boundaries. To make matters worse, periods differ from country to country — by the time England got around to having a Renaissance, Italy’s Renaissance was long since over (and that’s to say nothing about such incommensurable traditions as Sri Lanka or Ghana).

With those caveats in mind, though, we can at least consider the usual Some common designations for English literary history: after antiquity, mostly confined to the literatures of Greece and Rome, come:

• The Middle Ages
• The Renaissance
• The Restoration
• The eighteenth century
• The Romantic period
• The Victorian age
• The Modern age
• The Postmodern age.

American literature doesn’t divide up the same way, but there isn’t one widely agreed-upon set of period designations.

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Note: This guide is still in the early stages of development.
Three question marks mean I have to write more on the subject. Bear with me.