Ways of studying literature (concluded)

Chap 1 notes.

History of literature

To learn the true essence of a piece of literature we must dive deep into its history.

A great writer is not an isolated

fact. He has his affiliations with the present and the past;

and through these affiliations he leads us inevitably to his

contemporaries and predecessors.

Thus one can

developing even say any piece of literature at a greater sense belongs to a national literature as a
organism

having a continuous life of its own, yet passing in the course

of its evolution through many varying phases.

Thus in the study of literature one should always keep two things in mind:
1. the continuous life, or national spirit in it

2. And, the varying phases of that continuous life or, the way

in which it embodies and expresses the changing spirit of

successive ages.

(National spirit: the invisible string tying all the works of a particular country's literature together; a
unifying tie)

An ordinary book may perhaps give

us only a chronological

account of the men who wrote in those languages, and of

the books they produced, with critical analyses of their

merits and defects. But a nation's

literature is not a miscellaneous collection of books, it is a progressive revelation,

an age by age analysis, of such nation's people's minds and characters. Every writer may have their own
unique style of writing and their own sense of world and this uniqueness is what makes the writer
interesting but his genius will still partake the characteristic spirit of his

race, and in any number of representative writers at any

given time, that spirit will be felt as a well-defined quality

pervading them all.

A good literature of a country is the reader's peep hole to that country. it is through their literatures that
we

really come to know these peoples best, alike in their

strength and in their limitations, and to learn at first hand

what they have contributed to the permanent intellectual

and spiritual possessions of the world.

it gives us the

power of travelling also in time. We become familiar not

only with the minds of other races, but with the minds of

other epochs as well.

The history of any nation's literature, then, is the record

of the unfolding of that nation's genius and character under

one of its most important forms of expression. In this way

literature becomes at once a supplement to what we

ordinarily call history and a commentary upon it.

Conclusion

When history is the mere retelling of the incidents that happened to the people of a country at a given
time it is through literature we get to know their mental and moral characteristics,

realise what they sought and achieved in the world of inner

activity, and follow through the stages of their changing

fortunes the ebb and flow of the forces which fed their

emotional energies and shaped their intellectual and

spiritual life.