why establish literary periods?

Some examples of the kinds of literary entities that can be explored more easily when classified by time, place, and milieu:

• Contemporaneous or historical individual authors or groups of literary works with the same national or regional spirit.
• Contemporary readers, public, critics, literary academics, teachers, literary philosophers, and other literary constituencies who read or treat the works of authors in specific periods.
• Relationships between the authors and their constituencies..
• Relationships between one literary period or era and another.
• The impact of literature on contemporary culture.
• The impact of culture on contemporary literature.

ways in which classification helps

How can classification by the dimension of time facilitate an exploration of literature? Time can be a valuable way to classify literature because literature does not exist in a vacuum. Contemporary culture, society, nationality, geography, religion, climate, political movements, and a host of other such factors—factors that are external to literature—can affect authors and the literature they produce. Likewise, contemporaneous authors, works, and the world of literature as a whole can each other as well as the society in which they exist.

Insofar as contemporaneous cultures, societies, and literatures are interrelated, they may take on similar characteristics. These common characteristics tend to be specific to their time; they mark them as unique, special, and different from other cultures, societies, and literatures. Examination of such characteristics can produce illuminating comparisons with the cultures, societies, and literatures of the same or other times and places.

As with cultures and societies, literatures also tend to affect and reflect their environments. As a result, they tend to assimilate the special and unique characteristics of the culture, society, authors, works, and other literatures in which and with which they coexist. Coexisting, contemporaneous authors and bodies of literature often share common characteristics or differ from each other in revealing ways. Comparing distinguishing characteristics between the literature of one period and that of another period can be especially illuminating.

Just as there can be a Zeitgeist or spirit of the time that marks the general trend in thought or feeling that is characteristic of a particular period or era, so there can be a zeitgeist that marks the literature of a particular period.

Knowing the period in which a literary work is written immediately links the work to its milieu. A reader's understanding a work's milieu, gained from a variety of prior experiences, allows a reader to perceive more of a work's meaning and significance when it's read. Armed with this kind of knowledge, readers can better

• Enjoy what they read.
• Evaluate the literary qualities and accuracy of what they read.
• Appreciate and value the works they read.
• Make an emotional or spiritual connection between themselves, the world they read about, and the works they read.
• Delve into human nature, separating its essential from its ephemeral characteristics.
• Recognize the relationships between themselves and portrayed characters.
• Gain insight into the real-life world that surrounds them by comparing it to the people, institutions, societies, customs, manners, cultures, and other aspects of life presented in the works they read.
• Learn history, sometimes in ways that are more vivid or valid than history as depicted in history text books.
• Learn about themselves. Learn to relate better to their own real-life surroundings and be more comfortable in their skins.