History is, of course, a continuous process, but we may find it useful to establish some internal division into periods in order to approach our subject, literary criticism, in an amenable way. One possible criterion is to apply to the history of literary criticism those general divisions which we are already acquainted with in other areas of historical study. We would have then classical literary criticism, which could be divided into Greek and Roman; medieval criticism, renaissance and neoclassical criticism, Romantic criticism, and then the apparent chaos of modern critical theories. We will follow here this type of classification, but we will also try to discover any characteristics that oppose one period to the other in terms that are internal to the discipline of literary criticism itself. In this respect, it may be useful to provide from the start some guiding principle to have some hold of our own on the discipline before attempting an approach to the origins of literary criticism.