Literary Periods
In these pages, The Muse Of Literature explores authors and literary
bodies of work from the point of view of the period—the
time and place—in which they are written. The authors
and works explored here are strongly associated with a specific
national or regional literary tradition. The Muse also explores the idea of literary period itself, as well as literary
issues that arise because of literary periodicity and location.
about this feature
In this feature, The Muse has two primary objectives: 1) to explore
authors and works (bodies of literature) classified by period, 2) to explore issues and questions
that arise when considering how the period in which works are written affects authors and
their works, and vice
versa.
Here, The Muse
Of Literature is concerned with authors and works strongly associated with a specific
period in the life of a
national or regional literary tradition. Both the authors and their works
are defined in large measure by the time, place, and milieu they represent.
By milieu, The Muse means the host of factors that surround and
influence these authors during their lifetime and that are therefore
reflected in their work—macroscopic and exogenous factors of a cultural,
social, economic, geopolitical, physical, and historic nature.
Examples of such authors and bodies of literature
classified by time and surroundings are Elizabethan (Shakespeare), Victorian (Dickens), Colonial America (Cotton Mather) fin de siècle (du Maupassant), Age of Enlightenment (Voltaire),
and Jazz Age (Fitzgerald).
Both the authors and their works
are defined by the place, physical surroundings, and milieu they present.
Other examples of bodies of literature characterized by period and
surroundings are
British Literature, American Literature, French Literature, Russian
Literature, and German Literature.
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Understanding literary periods
A period is an interval of time characterized by the occurrence of
a certain condition, event, or phenomenon. On an historic scale, a period is
characterized by a specific and prevalent combination of cultural,
ideological, societal, technological, historical, and other wide-ranging
trends.
What is a literary period?
A literary period is a unit of time, usually measured in years,
decades, or even centuries, which is characterized by an assemblage of
cultural, societal, ideological, technological, historic, and other trends
occurring at a particular place. A literary period names, describes, and
helps define writers and works produced at a particular time and place, like
New York in the 1970s or England in 1600.
The assemblage of cultural, societal, ideological, technological,
historic, and other trends occurring at a particular place constitute a
milieu. A milieu is the assemblage of major environmental trends in effect at a place
and time; it's a set of surroundings which affect the thinking and writing of
individual authors and groups of authors based at that place. The way things
were in New York in the 1970s or England in 1600 are examples of milieus.
Since a
writer's beliefs and points of view tend to influence what he writes, his works
tend to directly or indirectly represent, reflect, and project the milieu in
which he lives or the milieu in which he sets his work.
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Technical Aspects Of Literature
The technical aspects of any written work are its properties and
techniques as seen from a literary and language perspective.
All writing incorporates and is made up of technical elements like meter,
form, sound (rhyme), and figures of speech. Techniques and language elements
like these are common to all fields of writing; all writers use them,
deliberately or subconsciously. Any particular work can by analyzed,
understood, described, and classified by the combination of the writing
elements it incorporates.
In this feature, The Muse Of Literature explores writing and writings from a technical
and design point of
view—structure, organization, tone, style,
language constructions, and
all the other technical aspects that make for coherent, expressive, and
effective writing, or its opposite.
- Explore The Muse Of Literature's feature called Technical Aspects of
Literature:
click here.
How to approach a poem
A pointer is a piece of advice on how to succeed in a specific
area. The aim of this feature is to provide a few quick and simple pointers
to visitors who want to understand and experience a poem more intensely. The Muse Of Literature offers visitors a few things to think about when
approaching a poem so as to get the most from reading or hearing it.
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