Subject: [Sidles round corner]
Author:
Posted on: 2019-09-26 15:35:00 UTC

Yeah, I can't stop thinking about this.

So, it's obviously ludicrous to try and break (Western) literature down into easily-identifiable periods, and therefore that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Obviously all periods are... kind of loose, but that's the way these things go.

-Early 2000s: the Era of Diversity. While non cishetwhitemen have always written and published, this is the era when their works have finally managed to break into the limelight. Currently very little PPC coverage of this - we're working mostly in fiction from:

-Mid to late 1900s: the Geekdom. From Tolkien to Rowling to comic movies, this is the period when geeky stuff went mainstream and became acceptable. Very much the playground of the PPC.

-Early 1900s: the Golden Age of Hollywood. Is it coincidence that a lot of what we remember from this period is detective fiction (Agatha Christie, loads of crime films, the entire Noir genre)? Maybe, maybe not. This is where the Noir PPC would slot in.

-Late 1800s: Escapism. This is the era of Wells and Verne, of Kipling and Twain and Conan Doyle. They took the seriousness of the previous era (see below) and threw in some seriously weird fantasy. This is probably the spot for the Steampunk PPC.

-Mid 1800s: Literary Realism. The Brontes, Austen, Dickens - during this period, a whole bunch of people thought that what we really wanted was a well-researched depiction of real life. I'm imagining a PPC equivalent set in a stately home.

-Early 1800s: Gothic Emo. Hello, Mary Shelley, have you met Lord Byron? Mr. Poe introduced us. The PPC of this era dresses in black and is prone to dramatic fits and torrid romances. Basically a whole bunch of horror-loving Byrons.

-Early to mid 1700s: The Uncensored Years. This period saw the rise of both satire - Jonathan Swift and Voltaire - and smut - Fanny Hill and (I believe) Tristram Shandy. Gods only know what their PPC would like like, though I imagine they wouldn't be very happy with the association with gods. There would be a small contingent trying to do things seriously, working fields like Robinson Crusoe, but they'd be a very small minority.

-Late 1600s: The Puritan Reign. Starting with the Commonwealth of England in 1649, and continuing with the Puritan domination of North America, this was I think a very religious era for literature. I'm not sure what the Puritans themselves thought of Milton's Paradise Lost, but a village of PPCers in daft hats musing on religion and condemning literary heresy would work.

-Late 1500s to early 1600s: The High Days of Theatre. Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their contemporaries. The Army for Protecting the Stage Worlds had a lot of work to do.

-Late 1400s to early 1500s: The Age of Printing. I don't know what this PPC would have been like, but I'm imagining them being founded right before the printing press was created, and being utterly overwhelmed thereafter.

Prior to this point I think things break down. You'd have a Chivalric Age when the Arthur stories were being written (which extends down to the Age of Printing and the Morte d'Arthur), probably contemporary with the Charlemagne stories and the Matter of France. That's your PPC Knights and archers, though how much they'd have to work with I don't know. Prior to that I suspect it's going to be a bunch of monks dealing with quirky visionaries claiming the Blessed Virgin told them she was really a lizard person.

Then, of course, we hit the Romans. I bet there's a lot of time periods we could break down in there, but I'll leave that for another day. ;) They segue into the Greeks, still playing with mythology, and ultimately I think we have to get back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. We know there were variant accounts of that story, so perhaps the earliest PPC was a group of Babylonian scribes scribbling brief tales of Gilgamesh and Enkidu killing off fake versions of themselves from then-current tablets.

hS

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