However, similar with other literary traditions, Javanese language works were and not necessarily produced only in Java, but also in Sunda, Madura, Bali, Lombok, Southern Sumatra (especially around Palembang) and Suriname.
Javanese texts indubitably written in the pre-Islamic period have been preserved for posterity mainly in eighteenth and nineteenth century Balinese manuscripts.
The few exceptions are some very old texts probably written in the tenth century in Central Java in the district of Mataram, in the basin of the rivers Opak and Praga.
According to Javanese historical tradition, about 1500 AD the last Majapahit King, ousted from his Royal residence by Muslim insurgents, fled eastwards and found a refuge in Bali.
In the course of time at the Courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth century South Balinese Kings of Gèlgèl of Klungkung, Old Javanese letters developed into a Javano-Balinese literature with characteristic features of its own.
Balinese language and literature of the second flourishing period, which endures up to the present time, are strongly influenced by Old Javanese and Javano-Balinese.
Its exact chronology is unknown, but its relationship with seventeenth and eighteenth century Javanese Pasisir literature or the following era is indubitable.
Texts belonging to the era of the scheme were written in the literary idioms of East Java, Madura and the North Coast districts.
Political power devolved from the inland Court of Majapahit to Muslim dynasts ruling in various maritime districts and trading centers on the North Coast.
In these districts, from Surabaya and Gresik in the east up to Cirebon and Banten in the west, a rejuvenated Javanese literature developed under the influence of Islam.
In the period of Pesisir culture authors were very active in writing books on all subjects belonging to the sphere of Muslim Javanese civilization.
The result was an amalgam of Muslim and pre-Islamic culture, in several respects showing survivals of ancient indigenous Javanese concepts.
The districts affected by them, Lampung in South Sumatra by Banten, and Bañjar Masin in Borneo by Central Java, did not produce Javanese literary texts of any importance, however.
The fourth era of the chronological scheme is the period of the renaissance of classical Javanese literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Surakarta Court idiom with its rigid rules of class distinction in vocabulary (the so-called manners of speech, krama and ngoko etc.)
Probably in the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century Pasisir literature was already on the decline in consequence of economic and political retrogression in the mercantile towns on the North Coast where the authors and their patrons lived.
After a long period of dynastic troubles and internal wars, which were detrimental to the mercantile towns on the seacoast, peace was finally restored in Central and East Java in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Probably since that time traffic by prao on the river Bengawan was instrumental in establishing contacts between Surakarta and Gresik, the ancient centre of the decaying East Javanese Pasisir culture.
In the nineteenth century Surakarta authors were stimulated by the presence of three European scholars: Winter, Gericke and Wilkens, who were studying Javanese language and literature in Central Java.
In consequence of the maintenance of peace and order in the interior of the country and an unprecedented increase of traffic by means of the railways, Surakarta (and, in a minor degree, also Yogyakarta) Court culture developed into a common spiritual sphere of the priyayi class, the gentlefolk of Java.
Apparently cultural conservatism upheld Javanese authors and scholars in the critical periods when foreign ideologies were introduced into their national society.
It remains to be seen whether in times to come Javanese conservatism will prove strong enough to adapt and integrate foreign elements with the same success as it did in the past.
Anyway, Javanese cultural conservatism seems a valuable asset in the amalgam of modern Indonesian civilization which is developing in the twentieth century.
Florida, Nancy K. (1995) Writing the past, inscribing the future: history as prophecy in colonial Java Durham, N.C. Duke University Press,