Placing a Passage in Its Period by Its Prose

The idea

When a question asks where a passage comes from, the prose itself narrows the field before any content does. Long periodic sentences with capitalized abstractions and direct address to a reader point to the eighteenth century or the early republic. Elaborate subordination with moral commentary from an intrusive narrator points to the mid-nineteenth. Plain declarative sentences about ordinary people, with dialect in the dialogue, point to realism after the Civil War. Sentences stripped to subject and verb, with the emotion withheld, point to modernism after the First World War. Fragmented interior narration without transitions points to the same period's other wing. Content then confirms the guess: a passage about enslavement narrated in the first person is almost certainly a slave narrative of the eighteen forties or fifties.