Erin O’Connor writes the bare truth:
In the entire country, there are openings for 9 medievalists, 14 Renaissance scholars, 7 eighteenth-century scholars, 6 Romanticists, 7 nineteenth-century scholars, and 12 twentieth-century scholars. Odds are that each opening will receive well over 500 applications–that’s how it goes even in better times.
Community colleges normally don’t post until the spring, and sometimes the summer, so those jobs will be available as well. Those jobs are for generalists and compositionists.