• Heroic literature
• Lyrics of courtly love
• An Excerpt from The Song of Roland
• Romance
• An Example of a Courtly Love Lyric
• For More Information

Throughout its history, literature has passed through two broad stages and is still in a third stage. In each of these stages, poets; playwrights; and, in modern times, novelists tended to write about similar subjects, mostly because these were the subjects that interested their readers or listeners. Ancient literature, for example, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, tended to focus on the activities of gods and their involvement in human affairs. Modern literature, literature since roughly 1700, has focused more on the...