Assess the role of storytelling in English literature and explain how it reflects and shapes

cultural values, beliefs, and identities.

Assignment Title: Research Essay Draft

Author’s name: Asteria (Mao Xiruo)

Author’s student ID: 2130025053

Essay Topic: Assess the role of storytelling in

English literature and explain how it reflects and
shapes cultural values, beliefs, and identities.

Date: May 3rd

Do you know the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood has several versions based on
different social contexts? This idea can date back to Aristotle's time. He maintained
that literature and other art forms reflect social reality (Halliwell, 2014). Storytelling
as human nature has a much longer history than this Athenian philosopher. Described
as “the action or activity of telling stories, or a particular story” (Simpson, 1989) in
the Oxford English Dictionary, storytelling in literature can be partly understood as
narrative, which is “an account of a series of events, facts, etc.” (Simpson, 1989).
Also, the narrative, which is defined as “narration as a literary method or genre”
Assess the role of storytelling in English literature and explain how it reflects and shapes
cultural values, beliefs, and identities.

(Simpson, 1989), varies from different historical periods and cultural backgrounds.
This essay aims to analyze the role of storytelling in literature to reflect and shape
cultural elements. First, it will elaborate on how storytelling as a method of narrative
in English literature differs across time and cultural backgrounds, and then discuss in
which ways storytelling shapes people's cultural values, beliefs, and identities.
The key points of storytelling in English literature mark the features of different
historical periods, which means narrative reflects social reality in an outward way. A
typical example is the Greek myth of Pygmalion recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Pygmalion was a great sculptor, who professed no interest in females but created an
ivory sculpture named Galatea and uncontrollably fell in love with her. Finally,
Aphrodite was touched by Pygmalion and brought the sculpture to life. It is
interesting to note that after Rousseau's one-act play Pygmalion, this celebrated story
has come back into fashion. In that 18th-century play, Rousseau emphasized the
depiction of Pygmalion’s efforts put into bringing Galatea to life. Such highlighting of
male artists’ efforts at creation reflects society's values on human reasons in the
Enlightenment era (Behlman, 2003). When coming into the Romantic period,
Pygmalion was often portrayed as a tragic figure whose desire for perfection led to his
downfall (Joshua, 2001). This reflects people were fed up with the blueprint set up by
those Enlightenment thinkers. The 20th-century account of Pygmalion is much more
satirical and metaphorical, as in Shaw's play Pygmalion. A study argued that “Eliza
[the variation of Galatea] suffers from colonial oppression resulted from class
difference, male chauvinistic consciousness and patriarchal ideology” (Duan & Zhao,
2015, p. 128). Such a rebellious account echoed the prevalent realistic and modernist
ideas. The above statement in narrating Pygmalion recaps how storytelling uncovers
the secrets of each age.
However, narratives in English literature reflect people's values not only
according to different eras but also according to different cultural backgrounds.
Western and Eastern fictional literature differ from each other in terms of storytelling.
This point can be illustrated by how authors narrate events and characters in their
Assess the role of storytelling in English literature and explain how it reflects and shapes
cultural values, beliefs, and identities.

works. Known as more individualized, “Western authors depicted the episodes in

greater detail than did Asian authors” (Wang & Yang, 2015, p. 118). Statistics show
that the event detailedness of the Western authors is twice that of the Asian
counterparts (Wang & Yang, 2015). This is because Western authors use detailed
descriptions to portray the protagonist's characteristics in response to their
individualized cultural values. This also related to the second point about
characterization. According to Perez (2018), Western literature tends to shape
individualist heroes while in the Eastern context, heroes are more likely to be a group
of people. For instance, the heroic novel Water Margin wrote stories about 108
heroes. But in the Western context, as in Homer’s Epics, the figure of the hero is often
an individual. Like Achilles and Odysseus, their courage, strength, and greatness are
what Western values. What can be learned from the above analysis is that authors
from different cultures were deeply immersed in and influenced by their own beliefs,
values, and identities, thus demonstrating discrepancies in the narratives of their own
stories.
In addition to reflecting, storytelling in literature can in turn actively shape our
cultural values and social identities. In terms of value, many ideas such as religious
beliefs, sexual orientation and moral standards are included. And storytelling as a
concept that can transcend social reality (Jenkins, 2021), to some extent dominates the
way we perceive the outer world. Just as stories regarding the homosexual
community, these things shape the understanding of homosexual groups. As Luo
(2022) mentioned, homosexual and family stories create and transmit prevalently in
contemporary China as a social movement. This literary storytelling campaign is
awakening an emerging concept called neoliberal sexual politics. Another aspect is
identity. People are social animals; identity is how we define ourselves in socialized
circumstances. In this sense, the narrative in literature can be helpful in establishing
relationships with others and finding a sense of belonging within a particular
community. For example, in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent black liberation
movement in literary history, many black artists applied the same pattern in creating
Assess the role of storytelling in English literature and explain how it reflects and shapes
cultural values, beliefs, and identities.

literary works. Jazz poetry is one of them. Writers like Langston Hughes defined
themselves as “Negro Artists” and used Jazz Poetry as a powerful weapon to
transcend racial boundaries (Theriault, 2011). And finally, this kind of narration
succeeded in sending African Americans on the road to racial equality. Generally,
storytelling in literature reinforces people’s cultural values, beliefs as well as social
identities.
To sum up, this essay discussed the role that storytelling plays in reflecting and
shaping cultural elements in the realm of literary narrative. Through storytelling,
people’s values, beliefs, and identities can be differently reflected by historical
contexts, such as time and cultural background. Also, storytelling can shape reality.
However, due to the limited number of words, this essay failed to delve into the
specific reasons that lead to different narratives in different times and cultures. Maybe
future studies can go deeper into how these different cultural and social realities are
related to literary storytelling in a cognitive sense.
(967 words)

References
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Duan, S. J., & Zhao, J. (2015). Pygmalion from the perspective of post-colonial
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10.16083/j.cnki.1671-1580.2015.04.052
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cultural values, beliefs, and identities.

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Assess the role of storytelling in English literature and explain how it reflects and shapes
cultural values, beliefs, and identities.

I [Mao Xiruo] declare that any part of the writing assignment is not directly
generated from the AI software. I take full responsibility for the content of the
assignment.