ASIAN LITERATURE

The literary traditions of Asia, the largest continent on the planet, are colossal in terms of scope and length of existence. As such, it is
wise to study Asian literature by geographical region.

How the Growth Occurred

East Asia
China is one of the world's cradles of civilization, has had an unbroken literary tradition that started back in the 14th century
BCE. This remarkable longevity was achieved in great part by the preservation of the Chinese language (both spoken and
written) over 3,000 years.

The finest era of Chinese literature was the Tang dynasty (618-907), when poets like Tu Fu, Li Po, and Wang Wei created
landmark works unmatched elsewhere in the world.
Japan
Despite being influenced by Chinese language and literature, the Japanese tradition has established its own unique legacy. This
includes the world-renowned poetry genre of haiku (a short descriptive poem of 17 syllables) as well as diverse forms of theater
such as Noh and Kabuki. Japanese literature, dating back to the 7th century CE, reflects the traditional Japanese cultural
identity: simple yet complex, imperfect yet abounding with beauty.

Korea
China's cultural influence in the region was reinforced when Korean poets began writing poetry in Classical Chinese as early as
the 4th century CE. This evolved to transliterations of Chinese works three centuries later.
Only in the 15th century did the Koreans establish Hangul, their own writing system that gave rise to a new age of Korean
literature.
South Asia
India
The Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads are important Hindu works that have shaped Indian literature. Veda was composed in
Sanskrit, a language that produced literary works as early as 1500 BCE. Though India's oral tradition dates back to antiquity,
written literature first arrived in India considerably later—around the 16th century. The succeeding centuries of British
colonization ensured that English literature would emerge as a vital influence, an impact that continues to this day.

Central Asia
Central Asia has a very different literary flavor. Parts of the region include Afghanistan, Kazakshtan, Turkmenista, Uzbekistan.
Mongolia, Tibet and Nepal. Central Asian literature-this time political in culture were the tsarist and Soviet regimes that
emanated from what is now Russia.
Middle East
The literary tradition in Arabic thrived. Islam, the area's cultural base, was an essential component. As Arabic literature
developed, it began to impact (and, in turn, was influenced by) civilizations with whom the Arabian people came into contact.
Persian, Byzantine, and Andalusian traditions are among them. Even European civilizations started to imitate Arabic literature
during the Middle Ages.

Southeast Asia
In Burma, literature has been heavily influenced by the Buddhist, Thai, and English cultures. Thailand itself experienced two
golden eras of literature: the first during the era of King Narai (1657-1688) and the second during the rule of King Rama II
(1809 1824). Malaysia and Indonesia, meanwhile, owe their literary traditions in large part to the Sanskrit language and the
Islam culture.
Contemporary Times: A Snapshot

China
In Modern times, Chinese writers have remained prolific. Though the social impact of literature may be as monumental as it
was in the past, the Chinese literary tradition is nevertheless prosperous. Notable names include Mo Yan, a fictionist who won the 2012
Nobel Prize for Literature. Remarkable too were the novels of Yu Hua, Wang Shuo and Shi Tiesheng: and the stories of Gao Xiaosheng,
Wang Zenggi, and Zhang Chenzhi.

Japan
Ever since the Meiji Restoration in 19th century, Western influences have permeated Japanese literature. Manifestations of this
include the pioneering of modern Japanese novels, translations of poetry from the West, and reinventions of traditional Japanese poetic
forms like the tanka and the haiku. In the genre of drama, playwrights like Abe Kobo and Mishima Yukio became notable for creating
world-renowned works.
Korea
The Korean War, which led to the creation of North Korea and South Korea, has created an indelible mark on Korean
literature. Themes of alienation, conscience, and disintegration have been present in Korean works since the 1950s. Self-identity has also
become a strong theme in Korean literature, such as poems, novels, and plays, well into the 20 century.

India
India gained independence in the 20th century, but the impact of colonial rule continued to manifest through the endurance
of the English language, and the emergence of postcolonial texts. Several Indian writers became highly accomplished, internationally
acclaimed names. These include Rabindranath Tagore (a Nobel Prize winner), Prem Chand, Raja Rao, and R.K. Narayan.

Central Asia
Russian influence continued to have a stronghold on literature from Central Asia. During the era of the Soviet Union, Abdullah
Qadiriy produced pioneering novels in the Uzbek language and Mukhtar Auez-uli became a noteworthy writer in Kazakh. In the 20th
century, Chingiz Aytmatov became a successful writer in the Russian language.

Arabic tradition
The issue of freedom of expression has become problematic for Arabic writers in the 21" century. Another pressing concern is
the tension between religious and secular movements--a conflict that also impacts the way that Arabic writers produce their texts.

Southeast Asia
Myanmar (Burma)
Colonial and postcolonial experiences were evident in Burmese works in the 20th century; to this day, these themes are still
dominant.
Thailand
In Thailand. the influence of Western literature became truly pronounced after the country came into contact with
the West during World War II.
Malaysia and Indonesia
Writers in Malaysia and Indonesia developed very distinct voices when the new Malay and Indonesian languages were born.

AFRICAN LITERATURE

AFRICA
● The continent of humanity’s birth.
 ● Africa has produced a body of literature that resonates with the human spirit at any point on the planet.
● Embodying the desire for freedom and contentment.
● African literature deserves to be studied thoroughly by any student seeking to paint a full picture of the 21st century, as
well as the historical periods that preceded it.
How the Growth Occurred
● The continent of Africa, considered by scientists to be “The Cradle of Humankind,” has a captivating oral tradition
and a body of written literature shaped by colonial and postcolonial experiences.
Linguistic flavors
- English
- Portuguese
- French
Oral Literature of Africa
● Serve the purposes of documenting the exploits of communities folk heroes.
Genres of this oral tradition
● Myths
● Stories
● Riddles,
● Proverbs
● Dramas.
- praise singers called griots performed accompanying music.

In the 1400s
- The emergence of the slave trade shaped the collective African psyche indelibly.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus, the African (1789).
● An intense depiction of slaves suffering.
● Poetry was also used to convey the horrors of slavery.

George Moses Horton (1829)

● A man who was born into slavery
● “On Liberty and Slavery”
● Died in 1883

● Newspapers came to be a vehicle of expression for the voices of audacious African Writers.
● Poetry continued to be an effective genre for this purpose
● This was made clear when the negritude movement came to prominence in the 1930’s, with French - speaking poets
like Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire , and Leon Dramas.
● Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka drew inspiration from local figures to express reactions against colonial repression.

19th Century
● The rise of resistance movement
● Literary works expressed the Africans desire to be freed from oppression.
 After the conclusion of World War II
● Cry for independence reached a crescendo
● Many African writers during this time wrote in European languages
● They gained worldwide acclaim.

Contemporary Times: A Snapshot

After the colonial experience:
● African writers have since chronicled new challenges.
● New, sovereign governments may have been installed, but their own problems caused writers to react.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o
● Imprisoned for a play considered to have subversive messages against Kenyan administration of the time.
● Ngugi wa Thiong’o, original name James Thiong’o Ngugi, (born January 5, 1938, Limuru, Kenya)
● Kenyan writer who was considered East Africa’s leading novelist.
● His popular Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first major novel in English by an East African.
● I Will Marry When I Want 1970
● Mũrogi wa Kagogo (2004; Wizard of the Crow)

Corruption in society, a longstanding theme of African writers in postcolonial times, was reflected in V.Y Mudimbe’s
Before the Birth of the Moon (1989)
EUROPEAN LITERATURE
ARCHAIC TIMES
- started during circa 750 BC
��2 Significant Literary Works:
● "The Old Testament of the Bible" by different authors
- composed of 39 books written in the Hebrew language
Genres:
1. Tales 2. Lyric poetry 3. Histories
● "The Epics of Iliad and Odyssey" by Homer (Greek Poet)
- believed by some scholars to have been composed across centuries through oral tradition
- chronicled the destinies of 2 Greek heroes like Achilles and Odysseus who embodied the war culture
��Additional Greek poet and literary pieces:
● "Theogony" and "Works and Days" by Hesiod (Greek Poet)
CLASSICAL TIMES
● During 5th and 4th centuries BCE, the Greek drama blossomed ● Playwrights of comedy (Aristophanes)
● Playwrights of tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, & Euripides) ● Lyric poetry (Pindar and Sappho)
● Philosophers: Plato & Aristotle
● Greek culture was later preserved by the Romans
● When Rome became an empire 26 BC, ruler Augustus Caesar needed a literary work that would embody Rome's
greatness
● "Aeneid" by Virgil – epic modelled on Iliad and Odyssey
● "The Metamorphoses" by Ovid – very long narrative poem
● Literary Giants:
1. Poetry (Horace) 2. Drama (Seneca, Plautus, & Terence) 3. Prose ( Cicero & Apuleius)
MEDIEVAL PERIOD
● Marked by the fall of the;
- Western Roman Empire (476 CE)
- Eastern Roman Empire (1453 CE)
● Christianity and Islam became political, social, and cultural institutions during the fall of the Western and Eastern
Roman Empire
● 2 Notable names from the religious aspect:
○ St. Augustine
- a Christian bishop and a theologian
- His 2 notable works are “The Confessions” and “City of God”
○ Dante Alighieri
- an Italian poet and is best known for his work called “The Divine Comedy”
● EPICS related to the Medieval Period:
○ Beowulf (Old English) ○ The Song of My Cid (Spanish)
○ Song of Roland (French) ○ The Song of Nibelungs (German)

● Work/s related to King Arthur, Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory

● Geoffrey Chaucer - one of the first great English poets who earned the title “Father of English Literature” with his
crowning achievement, The Canterbury Tales
RENAISSANCE PERIOD (mid-14th to mid-17 th centuries)
● Renaissance is a French word meaning “rebirth.”
● "Period of rebirth"
● It refers to a period in European civilization that marked the revival of art and literature under the influence of
classical models in the mid-14th to the mid-17th centuries.
● This is where cultures across Europe shifted their focus towards humanism and classicism.
● The Renaissance was a period of rebirth in Europe, and it was a period of inventions as well. One of the most
important inventions that changed Europe and the entire world was the printing press created by Johannes
Gutenberg in the 1440's.
ITALY
● Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, & Niccolo Machiavelli
○ "The Prince" (1532) by Niccolo Machiavelli
ENGLAND
● William Shakespeare. Whose poems and plays had become hallmarks of world literature.
○ "The Merchant in Venice" (1605)
● Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh, & Edmund Spenser
FRANCE
● Michel de Montaigne. He was brought to the literary scene as the pioneer of the essay.
○ "Les Essais - Livre III" (1580)
SPAIN
● Miguel de Cervantes of Don Quixote fame.
○ "Don Quixote" (1605) is one of the world's most famous and beloved literary creations.
NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD
● Started in the mid 17th century. Lasted until the late 18th century
● Also known as the” age of reason, enlightenment and era of logic”
● Neo = New, Classical = the day of roman and greek Writers. in
neoclassical period try to imitate the style of romans and greeks
● Have 3 stages: Restoration period, Augustan period and Age og Johnson
● Common themes are restraint and order
●Common form of Literature:
● Diaries ● Moral fables ● Novels ● Letters
● Essays ● Parodies and Burlesques. ● Journalism ● The rhymed couplet
Prominent writers and their literature in this era:
● François-Marie 'Arouet ( Voltaire) (french writer) ● Alexander Pope (English Poet)
- The fictitious Lettres philosophiques (1734) - The Rape of the Lock (1712–14)
● Jean deLaFontaine (french fabulist) ● John Dryden (English Poet)
- The Ox and the Frog (1668) - Dramatick Poesie: An Essay (1667)
● Jonathan Swift (Irish satirist) - A Tale Of A Tub (1704)
Romantic period (1790-1850)
- Began in late 18th century and lasted until mid 19th century
- Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the huge changes in society that occurred during this period
- The term Romanticism does not stem directly from the concept of love
- Romanticism focused on emotions and the inner life of the writer - Romanticism celebrated the primitive and
elevated "regular people" as being deserving of celebration
- Romanticism also fixated on nature as a primordial force and encouraged the concept of isolation as necessary for
spiritual and artistic development.
Themes of Romantic period
● Nature ● Individuality ● Emotion and Passion
Common form of literature
● Novel ● Odes ● lyric poetry ● ballads
Prominents writers and their literature in this era:
English poets
● John keats
○ Ode on a Grecian Urn published in 1819.
● William Wrodsworth
○ The prelude a poem Originally published in 1850
● Mary shelley
○ Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus written in 1818
● Samuel Taylor Colerigde
○ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) written in 1797–1798
● William blake
○ “The Lamb” first published in 1789.
English Fictionist
● Jane Austine
○ Sense and Sensibility originally titled “Elinor and Marianne” first published in 1811
● Sir Walter Scott
○ Ivanhoe written in 1819
● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
○ The Sorrows of Young Werther written and published in (1774)
● Grimm Brothers
○ Grimm's Fairy Tales written in 1812–22 originally known as the Children's and Household Tales
French writers
● Jean-Jacques Rousseau
○ The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality published in 1755
● Victor Hugo
○ Notre-Dame de Paris or (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) written in 1831
Realism
● A representation of how things really are, or being practical and facing facts.
● Up to the early to mid-20th century, realism gained significant popularity.
Prominent writers and their literary works:
- Emile Zola
- French Novelist - Playwright
- Journalist -"Thérèse Raquin" (1868 - by Emile Zola)
- Charles Dickens
- British Author and Editor -"Great Expectations" (1880)
- Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
- Russian playwright - Short-story writer -"The Seagull" (1895)
Naturalism ( 1865 to 1900)
● Ancient term for the physical sciences or the study of nature.
● Naturalism is the hardest literary movement in European Literature

Modernism
● An umbrella term that referred to early 20th century literary movements
● A literary period that started around the early 1900s and continued until the early 1940s, particularly in the years
following World War I.
● (3 Famous Literary movements)
- Symbolism - Expressionism - Futurism
● Max Planck
- German Physicist - Theoretical Scientist -"Where is science going?" (1932)
Contemporary Times: A Snapshot
● The period after World War Il is referred to as the Postmodern period. With technology advancing ever so rapidly
as each decade progressed, international transportation and communication became more efficient.
● In literature, postmodernism is characterized by the reinventing or reframing of past works; and the displaying of
sympathy towards minorities, colonized people, and the feminist movement.
Notable European writers in the Postmodern period included Italy's Calvino and England's Fowles.
- John Robert Fowles
-English novelist, whose allusive and descriptive works combine psychological probings—chiefly of sex and
love—with an interest in social and philosophical.
- His first novel, The Collector (1963)
- The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas (1964)
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), arguably Fowles’s best-known work, is a love story set in
19th-century England that richly documents the social mores of that time.
-Italo Calvino
- Italo Calvino, Italian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist whose whimsical and imaginative fables
made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers in the 20th century.
- Two of Calvino’s first fictional works were inspired by his participation in the Italian Resistance: the
Neorealistic novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947; The Path to the Nest of Spiders),
- and the collection of stories entitled Ultimo viene il corvo (1949; Adam, One Afternoon, and Other
Stories)
AMERICAN LITERATURE

How the Growth Occurred

Before European settlers arrived in North America, there was a diverse oral tradition of literature among more than 500
Native American tribal cultures.

Native American culture - worshipped sacred persons, deities, and even animals or plants.

Polical and social order of the tribes also varied: there are councils, theocracies, and early forms of democracies.

Having been shaped by these religious and political factors, precolonial American literature took the form of creation
stories, legends, songs, riddles, proverbs, fairy tales and epics.

The coming of the English colonists brought about the written aspect of American literature.

Puritanism - the religious movement that aimed to lead individuals to the light of God’s salvation.
Puritan works - served to transform the colonized, and to ensure that the colonizers would walk the right path.

Prominent names of Puritan Literature are:

(1.) Thomas Hooker (2.) Jonathan Edwards (3.) Roger Williams (4.) Edward Johnson (5.) Cotton Mather (6) Edward
Taylor (7.) Anne Bradstreet and (8.) Michael Wigglesworth

The historical period of the American Revolution—brought about the rise of intellectuals who molded the identity of
the new country.

Philip Freneau - is a pioneer of American lyrical poetry

Thomas Paine - was effective in using the pamphlet
Francis Hopkinson - was a prominent polemicist

Among the Founding Fathers of America, the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas
Jefferson, who later on became President of the United States, were especially powerful.

The theater scene and the novel were also on the rise in the 18th century. The plays of William Dunlap and Royall Tyler
were infused with the theme of love for their newly liberated nation.

William Hill Brown & Charles Brockden Brown - were among the earliest American novelists.

Washington Irving - wrote the story “Rip Van Winkle”

James Fenimore Cooper - wrote the novel “The Last of the Mohicans”
During this time, Irving and Cooper were among the first American writers who won critical acclaim for the
European literary scene.
The literary movements of transcendentalism and romanticism surged in the 19th century. Writers like Henry David
Thoreau, Margareth Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson produced works espousing the transcendentalist views of
social reformation and moral excellence. On the other hand, the distinct works of Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville brought American flavor to the Romantic Movement that originated
in Europe.

The division and tension caused by the Civil War led to the creation of realistic, passionate works like:
- Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (anti-salvery)
- William Gilmore Simms’s The Sword and the Distaff (pro-slavery).
After the war, regional literatures caught the attention of a national audience that sought the rebuilding of their
fractured America.

In the 19th century, American fiction went from the realism of William Dean Howells to the psychological mastery
of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

Poetry - was revolutionized by Emily Dickinson. In the early 20th century, Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings
continued to push the boundaries of the genre.

In the early 1900s, fictionists drew from several ideas like the Marxian social theory and the new psychology. In the
aftermath of World War l, African-American writers came to the forefront. Langston Hughes, Paul Lawrence
Dunbar, and Countee Cullen were among the most exceptional among these writers.

Contemporary Times: A Snapshot

The 20th century - marked the rise of literary criticism in America—a movement largely influenced by the poet Ezra
Pound. Critics pioneered the highly analytical study of several different literary genres.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, novelists depicted the hollow, tense life of the contemporary America that they knew. Poets like
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg became the leaders of the beat generation.

In subsequent decades, the political and social backdrop of the American nation provided plenty of materials for
writers to work with. Events like the presidential elections and the Vietnam War were ably depicted by Truman
Capote, James Michener, Don DeLilo, and Peter Taylor.