History of World

literature
Beginning of literature
 Earliest documented literary pieces emerged from the area now
called Middle East
 The oldest writing was pictographic
 the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, the story of the Sumerian king Gilgamesh,
a Mesopotamian odyssey was the first literary writing in the 21st
century BC
 The 16th century BC saw the birth of another milestone in the
history of literature: the “Book of the Dead”, a volume made up of
ancient Egyptian funerary texts
Beginning of literature: Ancient Greece
 the epic stories of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, dated back to
the 6th century B.C. they played a role in the development of
Greek civilization
 The basis for Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was an immense poetic
reserve created by generations of singers who lived before him.
 Greek comedy and tragedy developed out of choral performances
in celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine and mystic ecstasy.
China (Beginnings to 100 A.D.]
 Lyrical poetry stands at the beginning of the Chinese literary
tradition.
 The fusion of ethical thought and idealized Zhou traditions
associated with Confucius (551-479 BCE) were recorded in
the Analects by Confucius
 During the period of the Warring States, Ssu-ma Ch'ien produced
the popular Historical Records chronicling the lives of ruling
families and dynasties in a comprehensive history of China up to
the time of Emperor Wu's reign.
India’s Heroic Age [Beginnings to 100 A.D.]

 The Vedas are the primary scriptures of Hinduism and

consist of four books of sacred hymns that are typically
chanted by priests at ceremonies marking rites of
passage.
 Two epics that express the core values of Hinduism are
the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
The Roman Empire [Beginnings to 100 A.D.]

 With its military victories in North Africa, Spain, Greece, and Asia
Minor, the social, cultural, and economic life of Rome changed
profoundly.
 After the fall of the Roman empire, the concept of a world-state
was appropriated by the medieval Church, which ruled from the
same center, Rome, and laid claim to a spiritual authority as great
as the secular authority it succeeded.
 Literature in Latin began with a translation of the
Greek Odyssey and continued to be modeled after Greek sources
until it became Christian.
Roman Empire - Christian Europe [100 A.D. to
1500]

 The teachings of Jesus were written down in the Greek language

and became the sacred texts of the Christian church.
 Until Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, declaring tolerance for
all religions, in 313, the Christian church was often persecuted by
imperial authorities, particularly under the rule of emperors Nero,
Marcus Aurelius, and Diocletian.
 The four Gospels were collected with other documents to form
the New Testament, which Pope Damasus had translated from
Greek to Latin by the scholar Jerome in 393–405.
India’s Classical Age [100 A.D. to 1500]
 During the rule of the Guptas in ancient India, great achievements were made in
mathematics, logic, astronomy, literature, and the fine arts.
 Classical Sanskrit literature deals extensively with courtly culture and life. Aiming to evoke
aesthetic responses, many of the works admitted into the literary canon were poetic works
written and performed by learned poets who were under the patronage of kings. A highly
stylized form of poetry, kavya literature consists of four main genres—the court epic, short
lyric, narrative, and drama.
 Women in classical literature are rarely portrayed as one-dimensional characters who are
victims of circumstance.
 The kavya tradition is concerned with the universe and ideals. Heroes and heroines are
rarely individuals; rather, they represent "universal" types.
China’s Middle Period [100 A.D. to 1500]

 To many it is the era during which Chinese thought and letters achieved its
highest form.
 During China's "middle period," Confucianism declined in importance; Taoism
and Buddhism in fact began to acquire a more important status. With an
emphasis on personal salvation, they offered an alternative to the Confucian
ideals of social and ethical collective interests.
 Because of the way that it was integrated into life during this period,
the T'ang Dynasty is often considered a period when poetry flourished.
 Thanks to the development of printing, the vernacular traditions emphasizing
storytelling have coexisted and evolved along with classical literature up to
present times.
Islam [100 A.D. to 1500]

 Though most of the pre-Islamic literature of Arabia was written in verse,

prose became a popular vehicle for the dissemination of religious learning.
 Although Persian literature was borrowed from Arabic literary styles, it also
created and enhanced new poetic styles, including
the ruba'i (quatrain), ghazal (erotic lyric), and masnavi (narrative poem).
 More widely known than any other work in Arabic, the Thousand and One
Nights is generally excluded from the canon of classical Arabic literature due
to its extravagant and improbable fabrications in prose, a form that was
expected to be more serious and substantial than verse.
Western Literature [100 A.D. to 1500]
 Contrary to popular belief, the medieval period cannot be characterized as entirely barbaric.
During this period, national literatures in the vernacular appeared.
 The thirteenth-century story Thorstein the Staff-Struck is a short example of the Icelandic saga
tradition that speak's about the lives of men and women who lived in Iceland and Norway
between the ninth and eleventh centuries.
 Beginning in Provence around 1100, the love lyric spread to Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and
eventually England.
 The Divine Comedy offers Dante's controversial political and religious beliefs within a formal and
cosmological framework that evokes the three-in-one of the Christian Trinity: God the Father; God
the Son; and God the Holy Spirit.
 Best known for his Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio was one of the many medieval writers who
contributed to the revival of classical literary traditions that would come to fruition in the Italian
Renaissance and later spread to other parts of Europe.
 Although Chaucer's Canterbury Tales does not appear to be overtly political, it was written during
a period of considerable political and religious turmoil that would eventually give rise to the
Protestant Reformation.
Golden Age of Japanese Culture [100 A.D. to
1500]
 One of the earliest monuments of Japanese literature, the Man'yoshu (The Collection of Ten
Thousand Leaves), appears to have been intended as an anthology of poetry anthologies.
 Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, arguably the first significant novel in world literature, was
written in the early eleventh century.
 The Pillow Book is a seemingly unstructured collection of personal observations, random
thoughts, and perceptions that entered the mind of the author.
 Not only did the Tale of the Heike help to create the samurai ideal, it has served as an
inspiration for more writers in more genres than any other single work of Japanese
literature.
 Although Shintoism, the native religion emphasizing the protective powers of
supernaturalism, enjoyed widespread popularity, Buddhism began to play an increasingly
important role in premodern Japan, most notably in the arenas of literature and drama.
Age of Renaissance 1500-1650
 The period which went from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance up to the 17th century was
mainly associated with writers from Italy, France, Spain and England.
 Dante and his masterpiece the “Divine Comedy”, in Italy; Molière (The
Misanthrope, The Imaginary Invalid) in France; the Don Quixote of Cervantes in Spain.
 In England we had one of the greatest authors of all times, Shakespeare with
his Sonnets and Tragedies, timeless masterpieces, and Geoffrey Chaucer with The Canterbury
Tales.
 The 18th century saw the flourishing of The Enlightenment and literature was reflecting the
spirit of those times. In France the main names were Montesquieu (Persian Letters),
Rousseau (Confessions), Voltaire (Candide), Diderot (Rameau’sNephew); in England we had
Pope (An Essay on Man), Gay (The Beggar’s Opera), Johnson (The Vanity of Human Wishes),
Burns (Poems and Songs).
China 1650-1800
 Under the Ch'ing Dynasty, and especially during the period known
as the "literary inquisition," classical Chinese writing suffered a
devastating blow.
 China's autonomy and cultural self-confidence were decimated in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when European
colonial powers began to exert control over China's economy.
Ottoman Empire [1650-1800]

 In the thirteenth century, the Ottomans established themselves as

an independent dynasty in northwestern Anatolia, from which
they expanded into Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and the Balkans.
 Under Mehmed II the Conqueror, the Ottomans established an
architectural style that symbolized their imperial ambitions, a new
legal code, and a policy of imperial expansion. They continued and
enriched Arabic and Persian literary traditions.
Popular Arts in Pre-Modern Japan [1650-1800]

 To sustain peace, the Tokugawa shoguns expelled Portuguese traders and

Christian missionaries, who tended to play one feudal baron against another
in order to subvert local power, and prohibited any Japanese from traveling
abroad.
 During this period of peace and stability, the role of samurai retainers in
maintaining shogun authority shifted from warriors to bureaucrats.
 Often indifferent to tradition, this new merchant class developed a culture of
its own, reflecting the fast pace of urban life in woodblock prints, short
stories, novels, poetry, and plays.
 Ihara Saikaku is known as a founder of new, popular "realistic" literature,
writing about the foibles of the merchant class in urban Osaka.
Urdu Lyric Poetry in Northern India [1800-
1900]

 The most popular lyric genre of Urdu, a hybrid language developed from the
interaction of Hindi and Persian, is the ghazal.
 Derived from the Arabic praise poem (qasidah), ghazal reflects on love—
human, divine, and spiritual.
 Formal and thematic conventions are important to the ghazal tradition.
 Mirza Asadullah Khan, or Ghalib (Conqueror) as he is more commonly known,
is considered the most important poet associated with this tradition.
19th century Literature
 The 19th century was rich in giants of the world of literature.
 In England we had Austen with Pride and Prejudice, the previously quoted
Dickens and Stevenson with Treasure Island. In France they had Hugo (The
Miserable Ones), Balzac (Father Goriot), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Zola
(L’Assommoir).
 In the same years, in Russia, were published authors of the calibre of Tolstoy
(War and Peace, Anna Karenina), Dostojevsky (Crime and Punishment, The
Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov);
 in America we must remember Melville (Moby Dick), Mark Twain
(Huckleberry Finn) and Edger Allan Poe (Tales)
20th Century Literature
 The 20th century was deeply influenced by major events such as the Second World War and
the economic crisis which changed people and their values.
 There was a new type of literature in which human interest stories made their appearance
within the pages of books.
 For some it was the literature of thoughts and introspections (Hemingway, The old man and
the sea); for others it was the one of anti-heroism and mistrust (Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
 Orwell’s works: Animal Factory and 1984 in which he denounced the horror of
totalitarianism.
 For many critics the best novel of this century was The Great Gatsby by the American writer
Fitzgerald.