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Indian Literature11
Indian Literature11
The literature of those languages depended largely on the ancient Indian background,
which includes two Sanskrit epic poems, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, as
well as the Bhagavata-purana and the other Puranas.
The Mahabharata is one of the most important pieces of ancient Indian literature
and is cherished as a significant source of both cultural and historical information.
Composed around 400 BCE to 400 CE, it is a grand epic that tells the story of a great
war between two sets of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas.
The Hindu epic Ramayana relates the story of the life of Rama, the seventh
incarnation of the god Vishnu. It follows the story of his miraculous conception and
birth, his many exploits defeating demons in his youth and his subsequent exile,
defeat of the demon Ravana, and eventual restoration to the throne of Ayodhya.
EXAMPLES OF LITERARY PIECE:
1. MAHABHARATA
2. RAMAYANA
HEBREW LITERATURE
Persian literature, body of writings in New Persian (also called Modern Persian), the
form of the Persian language written since the 9th century with a slightly extended
form of the Arabic alphabet and with many Arabic loanwords.
Thus, especially in the Western world, the names Persia and Persian came to refer to
all of Iran and its subjects. Some medieval and early modern Islamic sources also
used cognates of the term Persian to refer to various Iranian peoples and languages,
including the speakers of Khwarazmian, Mazanderani, and Old Azeri.
The richness of Persian literature, one of the world's oldest, can be traced back to
medieval classical Persian. Beginning in the tenth century and lasting well into the
sixteenth century, classical Persian poetry and prose flourished.
In short, the ability to write in verse form was a pre-requisite for any scholar. For
example, almost half of Avicenna's medical writings are in verse. Works of the early
era of Persian poetry are characterized by strong court patronage, an extravagance
of panegyrics, and what is known as " سبک فاخرexalted in style"
Persian Literature differs from the common definition of “literature” in that it is not
confined to lyrical compositions, to poetry or imaginative prose, because the
central elements of these appear, to greater or lesser degrees, in all the written works
of the Persians.
During this period, three major styles of Persian poetry came to prominence: the epic
panegyric Khorasani style, developed around the tenth century in eastern Persia; the
Iraq-i 'Ajami (Western Persian style) that emerged in the thirteenth century, a lyrical
style that uses mystical Sufi concepts; and the Sabk-i Hindi.
Some of the famous works of classical Persian literature are the Shahnameh, the great
Persian epic, by Ferdowsi ()شاهنامه فردوسی, Bustan and Golestan by Sa'di ( بوستان و
)گلستان سعدی, Masnavi-e-Ma'navi and Divan-e Shams by Rumi( مثنوی معنوی و دیوان شمس
)موالنا رومی, Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam ()رباعیات عمر خیام, Divan-e.
The seminal work of Persian literature is the Shahnameh, an epic poem that recounts
the history of pre-Islamic Persia or Iranshahr (Greater Iran). The Shahnameh contains
62 stories, told in 990 chapters with 50,000 rhyming couplets.
During the early modern period, Persian literature evolved to include genres in prose
such as short stories, novels, satire, and humor. Persian writers introduced new
themes related to nationalism and national identity. Free verse poetry also found an
audience among the new literary elites.
EXAMPLES OF LITERARY PIECE:
1. MASNAVI AND DIVAN-E SHAMS BY:RUMI
2. CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS BY:FARID AL-DIN ATTAR
CHINESE LITERATURE
the body of works written in Chinese, including lyric poetry, historical and didactic
writing, drama, and various forms of fiction.
Chinese literature is one of the major literary heritages of the world, with an
uninterrupted history of more than 3,000 years, dating back at least to the 14th century
bce. Its medium, the Chinese language, has retained its unmistakable identity in both
its spoken and written aspects in spite of generally gradual changes in pronunciation,
the existence of regional and local dialects, and several stages in the structural
representation of the written graphs, or “characters.” Even the partial or total
conquests of China for considerable periods by non-Han Chinese ethnic groups from
outside the Great Wall failed to disrupt this continuity, for the conquerors were forced
to adopt the written Chinese language as their official medium of communication
because they had none of their own. Since the Chinese graphs were inherently
nonphonetic, they were at best unsatisfactory tools for the transcription of a non-
Chinese language, and attempts at creating a new alphabetic-phonetic written
language for empire building proved unsuccessful on three separate occasions. The
result was that after a period of alien domination, the conquerors were culturally
assimilated (except the Mongols, who retreated en masse to their original homeland
after the collapse of the Yuan [or Mongol] dynasty in 1368). Thus, there was no
disruption in China’s literary development. Early Chinese
literature does not present, as the literatures of certain other world cultures do, great
epics embodying mythological lore. What information exists is sketchy and
fragmentary and provides no clear evidence that an organic mythology ever existed; if
it did, all traces have been lost. Attempts by scholars, Eastern and Western alike, to
reconstruct the mythology of antiquity have consequently not advanced beyond
probable theses. Shang dynasty material is limited. Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 bce)
sources are more plentiful, but even these must at times be supplemented by writings
of the Han period (206 bce–220 ce), which, however, must be read with great caution.
This is the case because Han scholars reworked the ancient texts to such an extent that
no one is quite sure, aside from evident forgeries, how much was deliberately
reinterpreted and how much was changed in good faith in an attempt to clarify
ambiguities or reconcile contradictions.
Both in quantity and quality, Japanese literature ranks as one of the major literatures
of the world, comparable in age, richness, and volume to English literature, though its
course of development has been quite dissimilar. The surviving works comprise a
literary tradition extending from the 7th century ce to the present; during all this time
there was never a “dark age” devoid of literary production. Not only do poetry, the
novel, and the drama have long histories in Japan, but some literary genres not so
highly esteemed in other countries—including diaries, travel accounts, and books of
random thoughts—are also prominent. A considerable body of writing by Japanese in
the Chinese classical language, of much greater bulk and importance than comparable
Latin writings by Englishmen, testifies to the Japanese literary indebtedness to China.
Even the writings entirely in Japanese present an extraordinary variety of styles,
which cannot be explained merely in terms of the natural evolution of the language.
Some styles were patently influenced by the importance of Chinese vocabulary and
syntax, but others developed in response to the internal requirements of the various
genres, whether the terseness of haiku (a poem in 17 syllables) or the bombast of the
dramatic recitation.
The first writing of literature in Japanese was occasioned by influence from China.
The Japanese were still comparatively primitive and without writing when, in the first
four centuries ce, knowledge of Chinese civilization gradually reached them. They
rapidly assimilated much of this civilization, and the Japanese scribes adopted
Chinese characters as a system of writing, although an alphabet (if one had been
available to them) would have been infinitely better suited to the Japanese language.
The characters, first devised to represent Chinese monosyllables, could be used only
with great ingenuity to represent the agglutinative forms of the Japanese language.
The ultimate results were chaotic, giving rise to one of the most complicated systems
of writing ever invented. The use of Chinese characters enormously influenced modes
of expression and led to an association between literary composition and calligraphy
lasting many centuries.
SINGAPOREAN LITERATURE
The literature of Singapore comprises a collection of literary works by
Singaporeans. It is written chiefly in the country's four official languages: English,
Malay, Standard Mandarin and Tamil.
Although Korea has had its own language for several thousand years, it has had a
writing system only since the mid-15th century, when Hangul was invented. As a
result, early literary activity was in Chinese characters. Korean scholars were writing
poetry in the traditional manner of Classical Chinese at least by the 4th century ce. A
national academy was established shortly after the founding of the Unified Silla
dynasty (668–935), and, from the time of the institution of civil service examinations
in the mid-10th century until their abolition in 1894, every educated Korean read the
Confucian Classics and Chinese histories and literature. The Korean upper classes
were therefore bilingual in a special sense: they spoke Korean but wrote in Chinese.
By the 7th century a system, called idu, had been devised that allowed Koreans to
make rough transliterations of Chinese texts. Eventually, certain Chinese characters
were used for their phonetic value to represent Korean particles of speech and
inflectional endings. A more extended system of transcription, called hyangch’al,
followed shortly thereafter, in which entire sentences in Korean could be written in
Chinese. In another system, kugyŏl, abridged versions of Chinese characters were
used to denote grammatical elements and were inserted into texts during transcription.
Extant literary works indicate, however, that before the 20th century much of Korean
literature was written in Chinese rather than in Korean, even after the invention of
Hangul. In general, then, literature written in
Korea falls into three categories: works written in the early transcription systems,
those written in Hangul, and those written in Chinese. Classical Korean
literature has its roots in traditional folk beliefs and folk tales of the Korean
peninsula. Other influences include Confucianism, Buddhism, and to some extent
Taoism. Therefore, when Koreans began to write and
publish modern fiction using the Korean language - printed using Hangeul - their
main themes were individual freedom and the tensions between older and
younger generations. In particular, the advent of education for women radically
transformed their own self-perception.