By Lechi Eke
As we wound down to our contemporary period (the time we live in), we have to stop, catch our breath, and go over what we’ve dealt with in Inside Literature pertaining to Literary Periods before proceeding.
Literature is vast. It is a piece of writing that employs the vehicle of prose or verse and possesses a form, and expresses ideas of universal interests, and according to J. H. Newman, is related to man as science relates to nature.
For me, my joy in Literature is discovering people of old and how they lived, and their challenges and victories, etc.
Literature has travelled a long route from long before the Classical or Homeric Period (1200-800 CE) to the Classical Greek Period (800-200 BCE), Classical Roman Period (200 BCE-455 CE), Medieval Period, down to the time of the Confessions of Saint Augustine/Patristic Period (70 CE-455 CE).
This is a crucial time in history captured by early Christian writers such as St Augustine, Tertullian, St Cyprian, Saints Ambrose and Jerome. It was at this time that Saint Jerome compiled the Bible for the first time, and the beginning of the spread of Christianity across Europe.
Also at this time, the Roman Empire began to suffer death seizures. In 410 CE Rome was attacked by barbarians who migrated from the “forested fastnesses of eastern and central Europe” according to Stephen O’Shea, and that was the beginning of the collapse of the Roman Empire.
It should be recalled that the Roman Empire started in 31 BC when Caesar Augustus proclaimed himself an Emperor whilst Rome was still a republic.
The Roman Empire was the longest reigning empire in the world (27BC to 1453AD). It lasted for 1, 480 years, and was by far, the most famous empire in the world. When it conquered Greece in 146CE, real civilization hit the republic and endured even beyond the duration of the empire for it is recorded that one of the catalysts for the Renaissance was the influx of Greek scholars who fled from Constantinople into Florence at the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. Greek civilization was the highest civilization and endured through the long reign of Roman Empire into the Renaissance period.
In 455 CE Rome fell completely, to Germanic barbarians in the west, but continued for more 1, 000 years in the east with Constantinople as capital. Finally in 1453 AD, Mehmed II captured Constantinople bringing to an end a great empire.
Under Roman rule, civilization thrived, arts, literature, architecture, science, etc., flourished. One writer wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire that it fell to “barbaric Germanic confederates, to plagues, internal revolts … and hellenization.” Literature flourished during this period with such great minds as Ovid, Horace, Vigil, etc., and some of the most famous rhetoricians the world has ever seen, including Cicero and Quintilian.
It was also within this period that early Christian writers such as Saints Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, etc. were writing. These guys were mainly monks living in monasteries. Their Christian position is a factor in the fall of the Roman Empire for many Christians shied away from joining the Roman Army because according to them, Jesus preached non-violence; many able-bodied men were in monasteries as monks forcing the government to hire mercenaries from the barbarians. Besides depriving the Roman Empire their contribution in beefing up the army, these gentlemen because they were monks neither married nor sired children thus stifling growth in population.
The mercenaries hired by the authorities later turned against the empire. So from the Christian writers we gathered what was up during this period. One writer wrote: “There are certain Romans who prefer to live in freedom among the barbarians than the constant oppression of taxation among the Romans (this was because the empire was taxing the citizens heavily to pay their large army employed to fend off the barbarians (note that barbarian is a common name Romans gave people outside their empire)).”
Saint Jerome who was a monk living in a monastery (in Bethlehem?) wrote to a friend when Rome fell, “Terrifying news comes to us from the west. Rome has been taken by assault… My voice is still, and sobs disturb my every utterance. The city has been conquered which had once controlled the entire world.”
One writer wrote, “In 475 AD, the imperial insignia were sent to Constantinople following the capture of Ravenna by the barbarians of Odoacer and the subsequent deposition of Romulus Augustulus. The fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings, along with the hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire into Byzantine Empire conventionally marked the end of Ancient Rome and the beginning of the middle Ages (Medieval Period).”
So after the final fall of the Roman Empire (east), the civilized world was ushered in to the Renaissance/Reformation Period which lasted from 1485 to 1660!
Other periods are:
The Renaissance Period was about the Rebirth, resurgence, revival, etc. of Classical Period (the medieval had crept in after the classical period). So the Renaissance is a revival of the classical period.
Just by it, started The Reformation which is about an overhauling of things, an improvement, etc. The Church (Roman Catholic Church, actually) had at this time suffered diverse setbacks, including rebellion, and what’s called secular curiosity where many left the church to seek help elsewhere; amidst it, Martin Luther claimed he heard from God saying, “The just shall live by faith, not penance” and he got up from the penance he was undertaking and began to denounce many things that he deemed unbiblical in the Roman Catholic Church.
This period – Renaissance/Reformation was the time of William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I (Elizabeth Tudor or Good Bessie whose father, Henry VIII married six wives – beheading two, divorcing two; one died and one lived; and her half sister Queen Mary or Mary Tudor, the one known as Bloody Mary, the Catholic who burned Protestants at the stake for their faith), etc.
Enlightenment Period – a time of logic, rationality, deism, skepticism, empirical evidences and shunning of superstitions, etc
Romantic Period – idealism, impracticality, strong feelings (in trying to represent the emotional part of man, this school overdid it – it’s marked by excessiveness), use of imagination rather than empiricism, and a return to nature were more important to them than reason, order and intellectual ideas (time of Wordsworth, Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, etc).
Realism/Victorian Literature Period – it’s a period of focusing on the masses, middle class literature (time of Charles Dickens (mistreatment of children, child labour, etc. ), the Bronte Sisters (poverty, class issue, women problem, mistreatment of children, etc.), etc), reality – depicting things as they are, urbanization, technology, optimism, etc.
Literary Naturalism – their works include observation of outward appearances, but with further depiction of the ideas of determinism and pessimism. They also embraced such literary devices as Detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary in its portrayal of realistic situations.
Literary Modernism – we just treated.
Postmodernism – next literary period to be treated
Existentialism – shall be after Postmodernism
Someone wants to know the difference between Dramatic Monologue of Literary Realism as seen in Roberts Browning’s My Last Duchess and Interior Monologue as used by T. S. Eliot’s in The Waste Land. Both are monologues but the former reveals aspects of the speaker’s character as he rambles on. Of course we know that interior means within, internal.
Below are the Literary Periods treated in this column with dates.
Ancient/Classical Literature (1200BCE-455CE)
Medieval Literature (400AD-500 AD (1,000 years!))
Renaissance (1300-1600)
Reformation Literature (1660-1700 – it was part of the Renaissance)
Enlightenment Period (mid 1700s-1815)
Romanticism (1798-1870)
Literary Realism (1820-1920)
Victorian Literature (1837-1901)
Naturalism (1860s)
Modernism (1901-1939)
Existentialism (1940s-1950s)
Next week, we continue with Postmodernism Period as we move closer to the time we live in.