INTRODUCTION

The history and catalogue of the European literature is so rich that is quite close to impossible to
describe it and give justice to its entire list of great works and even greater writers in an introduction.
However ,to give learners a little background information, European literature refers to the literature in
many languages ; among the most important of the modern written works are those in English, Spanish
French, Dutch, Polish, German, Italian, modern Greek, Czech, Russian, Bosnian, and works by the
Scandinavians and Irish. Important classical and Medieval Traditions are those in Latin, ancient Greeks,
Old Norse, Medieval French and the Italian Tuscan dialect of the renaissance are also part of its
collection.

The Medieval Period (500-1500) of European literature already saw masterful works like Beowulf, The
Song of Roland, The Nibelungenlied and seminal work of Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. The
mentioned works of arts was followed by even more popular titles, because during the Renaissance
Period, writers like Edmund Spencer (The Faerie Queen), John Milton ( Paradise lost), and William
Shakespeare ( Romeo and Juliet ; Macbeth) took the level of its literary standard into a whole new high.

Following the Medieval Period was the Age of Enlightenment (1700-1800) and at its center was a
celebration of ideas – ideas about what the human mind was capable of, and what could be achieved
through deliberate action and scientific methodology. Writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
were the torchbearers of Enlightenment literature and philosophy. Rousseau was a strong advocate for
social reform of all kinds. His most important work, however, was Emile, a massively influential piece of
non-fiction that argues for extensive and liberal education as the means of creating good citizenship.

No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme and content than the Romantic
Movement ( 1798-1870) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Romanticism is concerned with the
masses and not with the middle class, the individual more than with society. The individual
consciousness and individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics. With the writers
like Mary Shelley and her masterpiece, Frankenstein and Lord Byron’s Don Juan, the focus of literature
shifted from the scientific to the mysterious.

Then came the Victorian Period. The name given to this period is borrowed from the royal matriarch of
England, Queen Victoria, who sat on throne from 1837 to 1901. The Victorian novelist and poets like
Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Gustave Falubert, George Eliot, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky and Thomas Hardy wrote with Simplicity , truth and tempered emotion.