Generalizations about Cultural Periods

A cultural period is a span of years during which the themes and forms of expression are similar and, in fact, unique, and so a cultural period can be said to exhibit the spirit of its age, which is certainly the way that William Hazlitt, that wonderful English Romantic critic, looked at the matter. Alterations in themes and genres provide a definition for a period, and so the long Elizabethan Age, which lasts from the Silver Poets of the 1570’s through John Donne, who died in 1631, is unified by its emphasis on drama and on the idea of the conceit, an image exploited for its various meanings. Any of the periods since the time of Chaucer and before and right up to the present can be considered in this light.

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