Literary Period and Man's Changing Image of Himself

(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

In the medieval period, in common belief, the seasons changed and people grew up and aged, but human nature and the nature of the universe were immutable. Man and heaven and earth were all connected to one another and to God. And every man derived meaning from that order. Dante, Chaucer, Aquinas.
In the Renaissance, as advances in science revealed mechanical laws governing the physical world, the spotlight shifted to man himself. God didn't go away. Rather He was put in parenthesis. Man's physical body and his reasoning ability became the focus of learned attention, the source of man's dignity and meaning. Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Descartes.
Greater attention led to greater knowledge and understanding of the workings of the human body and mind. The spotlight then shifted, in the Romantic period, to the realm of non-rational thinking -- intuition, emotion, poetic sensitivity to Nature. Wordsworth, Coleridge.
Advances in science then made Nature seem less mystical, less fraught with meaning, and the spotlight of great literature, philosophy, and science moved to the unconscious, the subconscious, the irrational. Dostoyevsky, Conrad.
As psychology revealed that the unconscious/subconscious of the individual was governed by mechanical rules, the focus shifted away from man as an individual, to entire cultures and to human consciousness as a whole. Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Frazer, Jung, Faulkner.
As science and philosophy came to the conclusion that the viewer is part of the physical system, that there are limits to what human consciousness can ever understand, the spotlight moved again. Literary works celebrated characters who willfully and heroically distorted their own perception of the world. Beckett, Sartre (Nausee), Camus (L'Etranger), Kesey (Cuckoo's Nest), Ginsberg (Sunflower Sutra).
That period abruptly came to an end as it became clear that drugs could mechanically produce the same effects.
Over the last sixty years, we have seen numerous serious works that hint at a realm of order and understanding lurking behind the everyday mechanical world. We see that in Pyncheon, Eco, Borges, Lem, Stoppard (Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern), Neal Stephenson. Sometimes that order echoes the order of the medieval period, suggesting that there really is a cosmic order that connects everyone and everything, but thay is beyond our understanding.
I suspect that a similar faith in an undefined cosmic order underlies many of these Lenses.