The English-American Literary Periods PDF

**The English-American** **Literary Periods** **English Literature** **Early Periods of Literature** These periods are spans of time in which literature shared intellectual, linguistic, religious, and artistic influences. In the Western tradition, the early periods of literary history are roughl...

**The English-American** **Literary Periods** **English Literature** **Early Periods of Literature** These periods are spans of time in which literature shared intellectual, linguistic, religious, and artistic influences. In the Western tradition, the early periods of literary history are roughly as follows below: A. **The Classical Period (1200 BCE -- 455 CE)** 1. **Homeric or Heroic Period (1200 BCE-800 BCE)** Greek legends are passed along orally, including Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. This is a chaotic period of warrior-princes, wandering sea-traders, and fierce pirates. 2. **Classical Greek Period (800 BCE-200 BCE)** Greek writers, playwrights, and philosophers such as Gorgias, Aesop, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Euripides, and Sophocles. The fifth century (499-400 BCE) in particular is renowned as The Golden Age of Greece. This is the sophisticated period of the polis, or individual City-State, and early democracy. Some of the world's finest art, poetry, drama, architecture, and philosophy originate in Athens. 3. **Classical Roman Period (200 BCE-455 CE)** Greece's culture gives way to Roman power when Rome conquers Greece in 146 CE. The Roman Republic was traditionally founded in 509 BCE, but it is limited in size until later. Playwrights of this time include Plautus and Terence. After nearly 500 years as a Republic, Rome slides into dictatorship under Julius Caesar and finally into a monarchial empire under Caesar Augustus in 27 CE. This later period is known as the Roman Imperial period. Roman writers include Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. Roman philosophers include Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius. Roman rhetoricians include Cicero and Quintilian. 4. **Patristic Period (ca. 70 CE-455 CE)** Early Christian writings appear from writers such as Augustine, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose and Jerome. This is the period in which Jerome first compiles the Bible, when Christianity spreads across Europe, and the Roman Empire suffers its dying convulsions. In this period, barbarians attack Rome in 410 CE and the city finally falls to them completely in 455 CE. B. **Medieval period (455 CE -- 1485 CE)** **The Old English (Anglo-saxon) Period (428 -1066)** The so-called \"Dark Ages\" (455 CE - 799 CE) occur when in 428 Rome falls and barbarian tribes move into Europe. Franks, Ostrogoths, Lombards, and Goths settle in the ruins of Europe and the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes migrate to Britain, displacing native Celts into Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Early Old English poems such as Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer originate sometime late in the Anglo-Saxon period. **The Carolingian Renaissance** (800- 850 CE) emerges in Europe. In central Europe, texts include early medieval grammars, encyclopedias, etc. In northern Europe, this time period marks the setting of Viking sagas. This period ends with the conquest of England in 1066 by the Norman French under the leadership of William the Conqueror. Only after they had been converted to Christianity in the 7^th^ century did the Anglo-Saxons, whose earlier literature had been oral, begin to develop a written literature. A high level of culture and learning was soon achieved in various monasteries; the 8^th^ century churchmen Bede and Alcuin were major scholars who wrote in Latin, the standard language of international scholarship. The poetry written in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon, known also as Old English, included *Beowulf* (8^th^ century), the greatest of Germanic epic poems, and such lyric laments as "The Wanderer," "The Seafarer," and "Deor," all of which---with either pre-existing pagan texts grafted on to by later Christian writers or outright composed by them---reflect the conditions of life in the pagan past. Caedmon and Cynewulf were poets who wrote on biblical and religious themes, and there survive a number of Old English lives of saints, sermons, and paraphrases of books of the Bible. Alfred the Great, a West Saxon king (871-99) who for a time united all the kingdoms of southern England against a new wave of Germanic invaders, the Vikings, was no less important as a patron of literature than as a warrior. He himself translated into Old English various books of Latin prose, supervised translations by other hands, and instituted the *Anglo-Saxon Chronicle*, a continuous record, year by year, of important events in England.  **The Middle English Period (ca. 1066 -- 1450)** In 1066, Norman French armies invade and conquer England under William I. This marks the end of the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and the emergence of the 12th-Century Renaissance (ca. 1100-1200). French chivalric romances---such as works by Chrétien de Troyes---and French fables---such as the works of Marie de France and Jeun de Meun---spread in popularity. Abelard and other humanists produce great scholastic and theological works. These four and a half centuries fall between the Norman Conquest in 1066---which effected radical changes in the language, life, and culture of England---and about 1500, when the standard literary language (deriving from the dialect of the London area) had become recognizably "modern English"---that is, close enough to the language we speak and write to be intelligible to a present-day reader. **Anglo-Norman Period (ca. 1100-ca. 1350)** The span from 1100 to 1350 is sometimes called the Anglo-Norman Period, because the non-Latin literature of that time was written mainly in Anglo-Norman, the French dialect spoken by the invaders, who had established themselves as the ruling class of England, and who shared a literary culture with French-speaking areas of mainland Europe. Among the important and influential works from this period are Marie de France's *Lais* (ca.1180---which may have been written while Marie was at the royal court in England), Guillaume de Lorris' and Jean de Meun's *Roman de la Rose* (1225?-75?), and Chrétien de Troyes' *Erec et Enide* (the first Arthurian romance, ca.1165) and *Yvain* (ca.1177-81). When the native vernacular---descended from Anglo-Saxon, but with extensive lexical and syntactic elements assimilated from Anglo-Norman, and known as Middle English---came into general literary use, it was at first mainly the vehicle for religious and homiletic writings. **Late or "High" Medieval Period (ca. 1200-1485)** This often tumultuous period is marked by the Middle English writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the "Gawain" or "Pearl" Poet, the Wakefield Master, and William Langland. Other writers include Italian and French authors like Boccaccio, Petrarch, Dante, and Christine de Pisan. The first great age of primarily secular literature---rooted in the Anglo-Norman, French, Irish, and Welsh, as well as the native English literature---was the second half of the 14^th^ century. This was the age of Chaucer and John Gower, of William Langland's great religious and satirical poem *Piers Plowman*, and of the anonymous master who wrote four major poems in complex alliterative meter, including *Pearl* (an elegy) and *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*. This last work is the most accomplished of the English chivalric romances in verse; the most notable prose romance was Thomas Malory's *Morte d'Arthur*, written a century later. The outstanding poets of the 15^th^ century were the "Scottish Chaucerians," who included King James I of Scotland and Robert Henryson. The 15^th^ century was more important for popular literature than for the artful literature addressed to the upper classes: it was the age of many excellent songs, secular and religious, and of diverse folk ballads, as well as the flowering time of the miracle and morality plays, which were written and produced for the general public. C. **The Renaissance and Reformation (c. 1485 -- 1660 CE)** The Renaissance takes place in the late 15^th^, 16^th^, and early 17^th^ centuries in Britain, but begins ca. 1290 in Italy and southern Europe, and somewhat later in northern Europe. **Early Tudor Period (1485-1558)** The War of the Roses ends in England with Henry Tudor (Henry VII) claiming the throne. Martin Luther's split with Rome marks the emergence of Protestantism, followed by Henry VIII's Anglican schism, which creates the first Protestant church in England. Henry begins the Plantation of Ireland, a confiscation of land in Ireland by the English crown and the colonization of this land with settlers from England and the Scottish Lowlands. This process creates large Irish communities with a British and Protestant identity. Edmund Spenser began his career during this time. **Elizabethan Period (1558-1603)** Strictly speaking, this is the period of the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). However, the term "Elizabethan" is often used loosely to refer to the late 16^th^ and early 17^th^ centuries, even after the death of Elizabeth. This was a time of rapid development in English commerce, maritime power, and nationalist feeling---the defeat of the Spanish Armada occurred in 1588. It was a great (in drama the greatest) age of English literature---the age of Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and many other extraordinary writers of prose and of dramatic, lyric, and narrative poetry. A number of scholars have looked back on this era as one of intellectual coherence and social order. Recent historical critics, however, have emphasized its intellectual uncertainties and political and social conflicts. While Elizabeth saves England from both Spanish invasion and internal squabbles at home, she intensifies the Plantation of Ireland. **Jacobean Period (1603-1625)** This period delineates the reign of James I (Latin, "Jacobus"), which followed that of Queen Elizabeth. This was the period in prose writings of Bacon, John Donne's sermons, Robert Burton's *Anatomy of Melancholy*, and the King James translation of the Bible. It was also the time of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies and tragicomedies, and of major writings by other notables, including Donne, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Lady Mary Wroth, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Webster, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, and Elizabeth Cary. **Caroline Age (1625-1649)** The name of this period comes from the Latin version ("Carolus") of the name of Charles I. This was the time of the English Civil War, fought between the supporters of the king ("Cavaliers") and the supporters of Parliament ("Roundheads," they wore their hair cut short). John Milton began his writing during this period; it was the time also of the religious poet George Herbert and of the prose writers Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne. Associated with the court were the Cavalier poets, writers of witty and polished lyrics of courtship and gallantry. The group included Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, and Thomas Carew. Robert Herrick, although a country parson, is often classified with the Cavalier poets because, like them, he was a "Son of Ben"---that is, an admirer and follower of Ben Jonson---in many of his lyrics of love and gallant compliment. **Commonwealth Period / Puritan Interregnum (1649-1660)** This period extends from the end of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II. England was ruled by Parliament under the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell; his death in 1658 marked the dissolution of the Commonwealth. Drama almost disappeared for 18 years; the Puritans closed the public theaters in September 1642, not only on moral and religious grounds, but also to prevent public assemblies that might foment civil disorder. It was the age of Milton's political pamphlets, of Hobbes' political treatise *Leviathan* (1651), of the prose writers Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, and Izaak Walton, and of the poets Henry Vaughan, Edmund Waller, Abraham Cowley, Sir William Davenant, and Andrew Marvell.  **AMERICAN LITERATURE** The division of American literature into convenient historical segments, or "periods," lacks the degree of consensus among literary scholars that we find with reference to English literature. The temporal divisions and their names, especially since the efforts to do justice to literature written by women and by ethnic minorities, are variable. Some recent historians, anthologists, and teachers of American literature simply divide their survey into dated sections, without affixing period names. A prominent tendency, however, is to recognize the importance of major wars in marking significant changes in literature. This tendency, as the scholar Cushing Strout has remarked, "suggests that there is an order in American political history more visible and compelling than that indicated by specifically literary or intellectual categories." The following divisions of American literary history recognize the importance assigned by many literary historians to the Revolutionary War (1775-81), the Civil War (1861-65), World War I (1914-18), and World War II (1939-45). Under these broad divisions are listed some of the more widely used terms to distinguish periods and sub-periods of American literature. These terms, it will be noted, are diverse in kind; they may signify a span of time, or a type of political organization, or a prominent intellectual or imaginative mode, or a predominant literary form. A. **Native American (pre -- 1620)** Much of the literature of this period is mythological. Most of Native American myths were written long before Europeans settled in North America. Like most cultural myths, these myths examine the creation, the nature of gods, and the natural world. Non-mythological writings of Native Americans often examine the relationship between Native American society and early European settlers and, later, the effect of United States' political policies on Native American culture. N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, and Louis Erdrich are all contemporary Native American writers that utilize Native American themes and experiences in their work.  B. **PURITAIN (1650 -1750)** Most of this is histories, journals, personal poems, sermons, and diaries. The literature is either utilitarian, very personal, or religious: it focused on daily life, settlement, moral attitudes, and the authority of the Bible and the Church. We call it Puritan because the majority of the writers during this period were strongly influenced by Puritan ideals and values, especially the concept of predestination and sin. "Puritan" began as an insult by traditional Anglicans to those who criticized or wished to \"purify\" the Church of England. Jonathan Edwards, William Bradford, and Ann Bradstreet are authors of this period. This period still influences American concepts about God, money, and America as the "promised land." **The Colonial Period (1607-1775)** This overall era, from the founding of the first settlement at Jamestown to the outbreak of the American Revolution, is often called the Colonial Period. Writings were for the most part religious, practical, or historical. Notable among the 17^th^-century writers of journals and narratives about the founding and early history of some of the colonies were William Bradford, John Winthrop, and the theologian Cotton Mather. In the following century Jonathan Edwards was a major philosopher as well as theologian, and Benjamin Franklin an early American master of lucid and cogent prose. Not until 1937, when Edward Taylor's writings were first published from manuscript, was Taylor discovered to have been an able religious poet in the metaphysical style of the English devotional poets Herbert and Crashaw. Anne Bradstreet was the chief Colonial poet of secular and domestic as well as religious subjects. The publication in 1773 of *Poems on Various Subjects* by Phillis Wheatley, then a nineteen-year-old slave who had been born in Africa, inaugurated the long and distinguished, but until recently neglected, line of black writers (or by what has come to be the preferred name, African-American writers) in America. The complexity and diversity of the African-American cultural heritage---both Western and African, oral and written, slave and free, Judeo-Christian and pagan, plantation and urban, integrationist and black nationalist---have effected tensions and fusions that, over the course of time, have produced a highly innovative and distinctive literature, as well as musical forms that have come to be considered America's most important contribution to the Western musical tradition. The period between the Stamp Act of 1765 and 1790 is sometimes distinguished as the **Revolutionary Age**. It was the time of Thomas Paine's influential revolutionary tracts; of Thomas Jefferson's "Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom," "Declaration of Independence," and many other writings; of *The Federalist Papers* in support of the Constitution, most notably those by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison; and of the patriotic and satiric poems by Philip Freneau and Joel Barlow. **Enlightenment / Revolutionary (1765 -- 1790)** Called the Enlightenment period due to the influence of science and logic, this period is marked in US literature by political writings and diverged from the religious focus of the Puritain era. Genres included political documents, speeches, and letters. There is a lack of emphasis and dependence on the Bible and more use of common sense (logic) and science. Writings expanded the truths found in the Bible and did not necessarily divorce from the idea of God and spirituality. The writings were often meant to explore the ideas of liberty, patriotism, government, nationalism, and American character. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine are all examples of authors of this period. The notions of liberty, freedom, independence, and rights that were discussed and debated at this time are still part of the American culture and political system.  C. **THE EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD (1775-1865)** The years 1775-1828, the Early National Period ending with the triumph of Jacksonian democracy in 1828, signaled the emergence of a national imaginative literature, including the first American stage comedy (Royall Tyler's *The Contrast*, 1787), the earliest American novel (William Hill Brown's *The Power of Sympathy*, 1789), and the establishment in 1815 of the first enduring American magazine, *The North American Review*. Washington Irving achieved international fame with his essays and stories; Charles Brockden Brown wrote distinctively American versions of the Gothic novel of mystery and terror; the career of James Fenimore Cooper, the first major American novelist, was well launched; and William Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe wrote poetry that was relatively independent of English precursors. In the year 1760 was published the first of a long series of slave narratives and autobiographies written by African-American slaves who had escaped or been freed. Most of these were published between 1830 and 1865, including Frederick Douglass' *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass* (1845) and Harriet Jacobs' *Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl* (1861). **The Romantic Period (1828-1865)** The span 1828-65 from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War, is often identified as the **Romantic Period** in America. It marks the full coming of age of a distinctively American literature. This period is sometimes known as the **American Renaissance**, the title of F. O. Matthiessen's influential book (1941) about its outstanding writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This period is also sometimes called the **Age of Transcendentalism**, after the philosophical and literary movement, centered on Emerson, that was dominant in New England. In all the major genres except drama, writers produced works of an originality and excellence not exceeded in later American literature. Emerson, Thoreau, and the early feminist Margaret Fuller shaped the ideas, ideals, and literary aims of many contemporary and later American writers. It was the age not only of continuing writings by William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper, but also of the novels and short stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the southern novelist William Gilmore Simms; of the poetry of Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the most innovative and influential of all American poets, Walt Whitman; and of the beginning of distinguished American criticism in the essays of Poe, Simms, and James Russell Lowell. The tradition of African-American poetry by women was continued by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, and the African-American novel was inaugurated by William Wells Brown's *Clotel* (1853) and by Harriet E. Wilson's *Our Nig* (1859).  D. **REALISM (1865-1914)** The cataclysm of the bloody Civil War and Reconstruction, followed by a burgeoning industrialism and urbanization in the North, profoundly altered American self-awareness, and also American literary modes. 1865-1900 is often known as the Realistic Period, by reference to the novels by Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, as well as by John W. DeForest, Harold Frederic, and the African-American novelist Charles W. Chesnutt. These works, though diverse, are often labeled "realistic" in contrast to the "romances" of their predecessors in prose fiction: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Some realistic authors grounded their fiction in a regional milieu; these include (in addition to Mark Twain's novels on the Mississippi River region) Bret Harte in California, Sarah Orne Jewett in Maine, Mary Wilkins Freeman in Massachusetts, and George W. Cable and Kate Chopin in Louisiana. Chopin has become prominent as an early and major feminist novelist. Whitman continued writing poetry up to the last decade of the century, and (unknown to him and almost everyone else) was joined by Emily Dickinson; although only seven of Dickinson's more than a thousand short poems were published in her lifetime, she is now recognized as one of the most distinctive and eminent of American poets. Sidney Lanier published his experiments in versification based on the meters of music; the African-American author Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote both poems and novels between 1893 and 1905; and in the 1890s Stephen Crane, although he was only 29 when he died, published short poems in free verse that anticipate the experiments of Ezra Pound and the Imagists, and wrote also the brilliantly innovative short stories and short novels that look forward to two later narrative modes: naturalism and impressionism. The years 1900-1914---although James, Howells, and Mark Twain were still writing, and Edith Wharton was publishing her earlier novels---are sometimes discriminated as the **Naturalistic Period**, in recognition of the powerful although sometimes crudely wrought novels by Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, which typically represent characters who are joint victims of their instinctual drives and of external sociological forces; see naturalism, under realism and naturalism.  E. **MODERNISM (1914-1939)** The era between the two world wars, marked by the trauma of the great economic depression beginning in 1929, was that of the emergence of what is still known as "modern literature," which in America reached an eminence rivaling that of the American Renaissance of the mid-19^th^ century; unlike most of the authors of that earlier period, however, the American modernists also achieved widespread international recognition and influence. *Poetry* magazine, founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, published many innovative authors. Her publication of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (after being urged to do so by Ezra Pound) in 1915 can be seen as the fundamental genesis of Modernism. Among the notable poets of the period were Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and e. e. cummings---authors who wrote in an unexampled variety of poetic modes. These included the Imagism of Amy Lowell, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and others; the metric poems by Frost and the free-verse poems by Williams in the American vernacular; the formal and typographic experiments of cummings; the poetic naturalism of Jeffers; and the assimilation to their own distinctive uses by Pound and Eliot of the forms and procedures of French symbolism, merged with the intellectual and figurative methods of the English metaphysical poets. Among the major writers of prose fiction were Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck. America produced in this period its first great dramatist in Eugene O'Neill, as well as a group of distinguished literary critics that included Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, and the irreverent and caustic H. L. Mencken. The literary productions of this era are often subclassified in a variety of ways. The flamboyant and pleasure-seeking 1920s are sometimes referred to as "**The Jazz Age**," a title popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald's *Tales of the Jazz Age* (1922). The same decade was also the period of the Harlem Renaissance. The 1930s, with most of the world mired in a great depression, saw the rise of literary radicalism in the U.S. **The Harlem Renaissance (1917-1920s)** A period of remarkable creativity in literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture by African-Americans, from the end of WWI in 1917 through the 1920s. In the course of the mass migrations to the urban North in order to escape the legal segregation of the American South---and also in order to take advantage of the jobs opened to AfricanAmericans at the beginning of the War---the population of the region of Manhattan known as Harlem became almost exclusively black, and developed into the vital center of African-American culture in America. Distinguished writers who were part of the movement included the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes (who also wrote novels and plays), Claude McKay, and Sterling Brown; the novelists Jean Toomer (whose inventive *Cane*, 1923, included verse and drama as well as prose fiction), Jessie Fauset, and Wallace Thurman; and many essayists, memoirists, and writers in diverse modes such as James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey, and Arna Bontemps. The Great Depression of 1929 and the early 1930s brought the period of buoyant Harlem culture---which had been fostered by prosperity in the publishing industry and the art world---effectively to an end. Zora Neale Hurston's novel *Their Eyes Were Watching God* (1937), and her other works, however, are widely accounted as late products of the Harlem Renaissance. **The Lost Generation** Many prominent American writers of the decade following the end of World War I, disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceived as the crassness of American culture and its "puritanical" repressions, are often tagged as "The Lost Generation." Gertrude Stein used the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, supposedly quoting a garage mechanic saying to her, "You are all a lost generation." The phrase signifies a disillusioned postwar generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to hedonism. The mood is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in *This Side of Paradise* (1920) when he writes of a generation that found "all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." A number of these writers became expatriates, moving either to London or to Paris in their quest for a richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot lived out their lives abroad, but most of the younger "exiles," as Malcolm Cowley called them (*Exile's Return*, 1934), came back to America in the 1930s. Hemingway's *The Sun Also Rises* and Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night are novels that represent the mood and way of life of two groups of American expatriates. Hemingway used the phrase "You are all a lost generation" as the epigraph to his first novel*, The Sun Also Rises* (1926). In "**The Radical '30s**," the period of the Great Depression and of the economic and social reforms in the New Deal inaugurated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, some authors joined radical political movements, and many others dealt in their literary works with pressing social issues of the time---including, in the novel, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck, and in the drama, Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, and Maxwell Anderson.  References: The English Major's Literature Periods Cheat Sheet https://jpellegrino.com/cheatsheets/TheEnglishMajorsLiteraryPeriodsCheatSheet-6x9.pdf World Literature Periods http://saisd001jdebolt1.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/66562957/literary\_periods