Schematically, Serbian literature can be divided (roughly) into several periods: medieval literature (1200 to the eighteenth century); Enlightenment, Rationalism, and Pseudo-Classicism (the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries); Romanticism (1840s to 1860s); Realism (the second half of the nineteenth century); "Moderna" (the beginning of the twentieth century); the interwar period; and the contemporary period (literature after 1945).
After five centuries of enforced dormancy, literature was revived, gradually, to be sure, in the form of Enlightenment, Rationalism, and Pseudo-Classicism. It was basically a period of transition, ushering in Modern Serbian literature approximately in the last two decades of the eighteenth century.
Long periods of Rationalism and Pseudo-Classicism ensued at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first four decades of the nineteenth.