Literary Periods

Welcome to Mr. Bostrum flips, and this video on the major literary periods in the shaping of our contemporary English literature. I'm trying to give you an overview so that when you study a text, you can quickly go and contextualize that by placing it in the appropriate literary period and thereby understand where it fits within the whole English Canon and the development of English writing.

So I would argue there are two major forces that shape the thinking in literary theory throughout the ages. On the one hand, down the bottom of the page, you have nature, beauty, subjectivity, and emotion. These are really strong values during the Classical era, but predominantly during the Renaissance and the romanticist era of the 1800s, and you'll see that as we get through those parts in the video.

On the other hand, at the top of the page, you have reason, logic, structure, objectivity, scientific approaches to writing and to literature, which is much more prominent in particular than near classes, classicist Enlightenment thinking, but also in modernism and to some extent in the Victorian medieval period as well. So we'll see those forces pulling one way or the other in most literary periods.

Obviously, when we come to the end here and postmodernism, you'll see that the thinking has kind of been turned on its head, and no one really knows what's up or down or right or wrong anymore. And therefore, I'll put that in the middle and that sort of squiggly line because no one really knows where the thinking is going in the postmodern era. But we'll we'll come back to that at the end of this video.

I might have to break this video into two segments because it is going to be quite a lengthy video because I'm covering 4,500 years in the span of one video. So let's start by examining the classical writing from the ancient period. There is writing from as early as 2600 BC, but this Egyptian papyrus writing is maybe not what we would call a literary name, but more historical and documentary.

So I think the first literary texts as such would be the Gilgamesh epic from about 2000 BC, setting in what's today Iran, dealing with the adventures of King Gilgamesh. And I think that sets the tone for this era to some extent because we're dealing with oral traditions of heroes, stories of people who are gods or kings or combinations thereof. And we see in The Iliad and the Odyssey, we see the exploits of Odysseus and of the kings and princes around Troy and Greece and how they fight for power and to preserve preserve their family or preserve their powers or preserve their sanity in some cases.

And so these myths are definitely part of shaping of these myths as part of this period, as well as, as obviously we were building the foundations for religious thinking in the writings of texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible and the Torah, which are all coming out of this time period.

If you were tempted on the previous slide, you will notice that from the end of this Classical period until what we would call the medieval period, there's a bit of a 500-year gap there, which is primarily there because the literacy levels were so low that really there's very little writing preserved; very little was written at all during that era. Whereas obviously about 500, we start getting monasteries, etc., where people are educated and they start to write things down. So we'll see there's a little bit of a gap before we move into the medieval period on the next slide.

So as we move into the period that we would call the medieval period, which stretches roughly from 500 to about 1500, we we start seeing more extensive writing and more maybe what we consider traditional writing today. Most of the writing at the time obviously was in Latin because the educated people who were able to write were predominantly priests and monks who were trained in Latin, and so therefore they're also often centered on Christian morality and the chivalry code with the whole Crusades and those sort of sort of writing. But we do have the budding of Old English and Middle English prose in here as well, with the story of Beowulf from somewhere around 900 to 1000. And then in Italy, we start getting some some budding more romantic—not in the sense of the era of romanticism—but more love-centered text in in the epic rock and songs in the Kansai area, but also in the biblical stories or biblical allegory I'd like to call the Divine Comedy of Dante. And then we have some some meta-narratives with the Decameron or the Camera Rona and the Canterbury Tales that kind of come out of this era as well.

So next up in our little journey, we move to the Renaissance period. I've set the date for the Renaissance period for 1550, which is somewhat inaccurate, but that is I guess when most of the seminal texts start to be produced during this era. But more accurately, the start of the Renaissance really comes from two major influences: one was the invention by Johannes Gutenberg of the printing press, which meant that we could print a lot more books because books are no longer just handwritten, and so you could produce a much more text, which meant people could read them. And also, to the fact that we, with the Reformation of the Catholic Church into Protestant and Protestantism, people started to to speak and read and write about religion in their own language. So for in our case, English, the Bible was translated into English, and therefore people were able to read it even if they hadn't been educated in Latin. And that so those two forces together kind of led to this this explosion of literary production, if you like. So we the classical, excuse me, so the word Renaissance comes out of the word ray rien a, so again born, so the rebirth of the Classical period. So the ideas, the myths, and the heroes from the Classical period are coming back to us, as well as the unities that Aristotle described in his book Poetics. We're talking about the unity of time, the unity of place, and the unity of action. Those become really important in terms of constructing narratives, and writers were trying to adhere to those traditional ways of writing. Expression became much more free because we were now trying to investigate new ways of writing, so which led to a range of, particularly drama coming out of the era with Shakespeare and Marlowe, etc., but also expression in terms of poetry with the metaphysicians like like Donne and Herbert, and and eventually in Spain we have the birth of the novel as well with Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, I guess in 1605.

Following the Renaissance period, we have a period of neoclassicism. Now the date again is a bit loose here. Some people would argue that the neo-classicist era really starts with Dick Hartwell, Rene Descartes, Cognito ergo sum, some I think therefore I am. Others would argue that the writing of Isaac Newton's Principia in 1687 would be the start of of the period, about Descartes 1637 or Newton 1687. Some room in the middle there is probably the true star of of classicism, but they're both scientific thinkers, and they're both seeing that we can use science to help understand nature better. So this this era also called, most if you think of it more scientifically into other fields, we call it the Age of Enlightenment. This is when all the big academies are born, a lot of scientific discoveries, etc. In England, we have the restoration period as well, which I'm not going to go into today, but but generally we have a society that's much more about order and accuracy in structure and trying to understand the world through science. So and in that science, people also able to find a sense of religious solace. So by finding a natural order in the world, people felt spiritually at ease as well. Obviously, during this era, we also have a lot of exploration continuing from from the previous period, but people are going off to explore previously unknown parts of the world.

Next off, we move on to the romanticist era. So again, with the timing here, some would say that romanticism came out of the era of revolutions, with the American War of Independence as well as the French Revolution in 1789. But I think the the kind of the real kickstart to the romanticist era would be the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. In in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth says that writing is really about expressing, or it is really about a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, and how essentially by in quiet meditation we can recall those moments of intense emotional experiences. And so that's kind of what the romanticists are searching for, and they're exploring how nature is mysterious. So quite the opposite of the the way the people of the Enlightenment were trying to illustrate how through science we could explain everything in nature, the romanticists were saying, no, no, no, it's all very mysterious and difficult to to understand. People became aware of their own mortality and about the constant change in society, in how we couldn't pin down reality. The imagination, as I said, was very important because they sat down and reflected upon those intense experiences they've previously had, and the search for the sublime. He's seen these two landscape drawings that I've included, how human is kind of searching for these experiences where he feels little and really finds the sense of awesomeness in nature, a true beauty and a personal exchange with that beauty, and the natural experience and the emotion that brings is really crucial to this. And with that comes eventually the Gothic period and then the and emotional experiences that we find in in the supernatural elements in post short stories, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, in Jane Eyre, in Wuthering Heights, etc., etc. Those kind of Gothic and frightening horror stories, if you like.

This next period is really contained to just Great Britain, or even to England, I would say, because the Victorian era is really about the era under the reign, the rule of of Queen Victoria. She was Queen from 1837 to 1901. But within the Victorian era, we have kind of two conflicting ideas—they are not conflicting necessarily, but two parallel ideas. On the one hand, there's the exploration, the realistic exploration of of the working-class situation and the urbanization and what industrialization has done to to people generally. So we get that in stories like like although the novels of of Charles Dickens, David Copperfield or the Twist, Great Expectations, they're exploring what it's like for the working-class people in urbanized cities. And on the other hand, we have these stories about respectability, where people are kind of concealing their true natures within facades of being perfectly respectable. So so there's a lot of of a tension there between what people feel on the inside and what they can actually show on the outside. And we get those kind of things explode, for instance, in the novels of Thomas Hardy, but also in some of the French symbolist poetry that comes out of that same emotion. They're trying to contain emotion and and how that kind of bubbles out on the outside.

We then move into the era of modernism, which stretches roughly from the end of Victoria's reign until the Second World War, or even up to, I guess, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. In this period, we're dealing with a rejection of the past. So so the early modernists would be looking back at the romanticists and maybe even more at the neo-classicists and the Enlightenment thinkers and rejecting the way that they viewed the world. In that they were also trying to use practical scientific experimentation to to see if they can find new ways to explain the world and new ways to to to kind of examine the world. And we see there's an art like Picasso's, where he's trying to represent elements of humanity but but in a new way. So we see it in in Ezra Pound's, both his poetic writing, but maybe more in his his essays and his thinking on these issues. And obviously, we have changes in psychology with with Freud and psychoanalysis. But in the middle of this period, obviously, is we have the First World War, 1914 to 1918, which really led to further rejection of the past, with with a great sense of nihilism and and kind of meaninglessness in the world. And people were starting to even more look at what had been and what was it truly like to be to be human in a sense. And this was questioned even more as we move into to our next period because in 1945, with there's really two major things that had challenged traditional thinking up to that point. On the one hand, there was the inhumane treatment of of everyone in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany because traditionally, if we look back historically, Germany, along with with England and America and France, had been seen as the good guys, the people who who were rational, who were logical, who were the advanced people in scientific thinking. And now suddenly, with this incarceration and torture of millions of people, the good guy had become the ultimate bad guy. And on top of that, in 1945, with with the U.S., also up to this point seen as as a humanitarian and a good guy, dropping two bombs on civilian cities and and eradicating such enormous quantities of people in Japan was also now really questioned and and seeing what what happened. I was to two great nations suddenly became murderers. And this this kind of led to this the sense of disillusionment with the traditional meta-narrative. Could the good guy be the bad guy? Or really should be should the woodsman kill Red Riding Hood instead of killing the big bad wolf? Or should the the knight go off and marry the dragon instead of marrying the princess? We kind of started to question the whole idea of the meta-narrative: who is good and who is bad, and is there anymore a single truth to be had? Which means that writing in author comes out of this period; it's much more about parody and pastiche and trying to make fun of things that have been in the past and and really not trying to examine the world as such anymore because the world doesn't offer answers. Instead, trying to challenge it by creating metafictional writings where whether the narrator is no longer reliable, that we're skipping in chronology and things are broken up and confusing, we're crossing as many boundaries as we can. And we see that in there there's no real sort of this is the way a postmodern narrative looks, but rather we have a such a plethora of styles of writing, but they are all playing with, challenging the narratives of their of their past.

So the end of the postmodern era is debated. Some people would say that we're still living in a postmodern world, and and I'm not necessarily disputing that, but traditionally we would say, I think that with the with the knocking down the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world was somewhat healed, or at least the scars of World War II were kind of destroyed, and therefore we moved into some sort of new epoch. But I don't think we could say that this new epoch is really labeled in any way yet. I'm going to call it the post-postmodernism, and that's because this it's not really clear where we're heading next. And wisely, if we look back at all these periods I've covered in this video, we at the time they didn't say, oh, I live in the medieval period. It's something that we have labeled it in hindsight. We're maybe able to look back and examine the changes in ideas and the ways of thinking, but where the world is is right now and where we're heading is very hard to put a finger finger on. I think we can definitely see there's an increased fear and confusion in the world post-2001. So I guess you could say that that also was a significant shift with the twin towers in in on 9/11. But we're also living in a world of increased nationalism, so we're kind of heading back in that way, in a sense, to the 1930s again, where national boundaries are getting their be stronger in some cases, in some part of the world, and to identify today which are the seminal texts of our era is also very hard to do when we're not really clear on what is the current dominant ways of thinking. But I hope this video's giving you a bit of an idea about the streams back and forth in thinking and in influences of the literary period. Any questions or comments, please post those below or send me a message, and I'm happy to engage in further videos with those comments. Thanks very much.