ABSTRACT

History is an ongoing, indivisible process continuing from one phase to another, and literary evolution also follows a natural path without demarcations. Just as yesterday and today flow into each other, the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century are not independent categories. It is impossible to see where one ends, and where the other starts… . When people discuss so-called “eighteenth-century literature” we should remember that it is only a designation made for the sake of convenience, and is, in fact, a quite inconvenient one.