Theme

Write in the test/assignment – 3 parts

• Fearless –
• What in fearlessness (naïve/ knowledge
• What does it do –hold them back (action)
• What does it achieve – catch them – help (results)

• Fearlessness amidst the most challenging circumstances – reacts as

per his and the opponents' position – composed – see through – pick
up the most viable option at the moment to defeat the enemy
Theme
• an idea that recurs in or pervades a work of art or literature.
• TSL – 14:00
• W&P – 2:50; 2:57:45
• TKAMB – 1:09:15
Types of themes ???
• Redemption
• Resurrection
• Prodigal Son
• Transformation
• Vengeance
• Innocence
• Justice
• Sacrifice
• Jealousy
• Friendship
• Fate
• And the biggest one of all: Love??? FEAR
Diversity
• American literature, English literature, German literature, 
Greek literature, Latin American literature, and 
Scandinavian literature. Various other Western literatures—including
those in the Armenian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Romanian
 languages.
 Ancient Literature
• Five ancient civilizations—Babylon and Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the 
culture of the Israelites in Palestine—each came into contact with one or more of
the others.
• Babylon produced the first full code of laws
• Egypt’s mystical intuition of a supernatural world caught the imagination of the
Greeks and Romans. 
• Hebrew culture exerted its greatest literary influence on the West because of the
place held by its early writings as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible; and
this literature profoundly influenced
 Ancient Literature
• The Greek epic of Homer was the model for the Latin of Virgil;
• the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle in those of any ancient Roman,
for the practical Romans were not philosophers.
• Whereas Greek writers excelled in abstraction, the Romans had an unusually
concrete vision and, as their art of portraiture shows, were intensely interested in
human individuality.
 Ancient Literature
• St. Augustine concentrated spirituality
• Though influenced by the religious myths of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and
Egypt, Greek literature has no direct literary ancestry and appears self-originated.
Roman writers looked to Greek precept for themes, treatment, and choice of
verse and metre.
• All of the chief kinds of literature—epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric, satire, history, 
biography, and prose narrative—were established by the Greeks and Romans,
and later developments have for the most part been secondary extensions.
 Ancient Literature
• In sum, the work of these writers and others and perhaps especially that of Greek authors expresses
the imaginative and moral temper of Western man.
• It has helped to create his values and to hand on a tradition to distant generations.
• Homer’s epics extend their concern from the right treatment of strangers to behaviour in situations of
deep involvement among rival heroes, their foes, and the overseeing gods;
• the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles are a sublime expression of man’s breakthrough into moral
awareness of his situation.
• Among Roman authors an elevated Stoicism stressing the sense of duty is common to many, from
Naevius, Ennius, and Cato to Virgil, Horace, and Seneca.
• A human ideal is to be seen in the savage satire of Juvenal and in Anacreon’s songs of love and wine, as
it is in the philosophical thought of Plato and Aristotle.
• It is given voice by a chorus of Sophocles, “Wonders are many, but none is more wonderful than man,
the power that crosses the white sea. . . .” The human ideal held up in Greek and Latin literature,
formed after civilization had emerged from earlier centuries of barbarism, was to be transformed,
before the ancient world came to its close, into the spiritual ideal of Judeo-Christianity, whose writers
foreshadowed medieval literature.
 Middle Ages
• Medieval, “belonging to the Middle Ages,” is used here to refer to the literature
 of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean from as early as the establishment of
the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire about AD 300 for medieval Greek, from
the period following upon the fall of Rome in 476 for medieval Latin, and from
about the time of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance he fostered in
France (c. 800) to the end of the 15th century for most written vernacular
 literatures.
 Christianity and the church
• The establishment of Christianity - the systematic approach to life, literature, and
religion developed by the early Church Fathers.
• In the West, the fusion of Christian and classical philosophy formed the basis of the
medieval habit of interpreting life symbolically. Through St. Augustine, Platonic and
Christian thought were reconciled: the permanent and uniform order of the Greek
universe was given Christian form; nature became sacramental, a symbolic revelation
of spiritual truth. 
• Classical literature was invested with this same symbolism; exegetical, or
interpretative, methods first applied to the Scriptures were extended as a general
principle to classical and secular writings.
• The allegorical or symbolic approach that found in Virgil a pre-Christian prophet and
in the Aeneid a narrative of the soul’s journey through life to paradise (Rome)
belonged to the same tradition as Dante’s allegorical conception of himself and his
journey in The Divine Comedy.
 Vernacular works and drama
• The main literary values of the period are found in vernacular works. The pre-Christian literature of Europe belonged to an 
oral tradition that was reflected in the Poetic Edda and the sagas, or heroic epics, of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and
the German Song of Hildebrand. 
• These belonged to a common Germanic alliterative tradition, but all were first recorded by Christian scribes at dates later
than the historical events they relate, and the pagan elements they contain were fused with Christian thought and feeling.
• The mythology of Icelandic literature was echoed in every Germanic language and clearly stemmed from a common
European source.
• Only the Scandinavian texts, however, give a coherent account of the stories and personalities involved. Numerous ballads
in different countries also reflect an earlier native tradition of oral recitation.
• Among the best known of the many genres that arose in medieval vernacular literatures were the romance and the 
courtly love lyric, both of which combined elements from popular oral traditions with those of more scholarly or refined
literature and both derived largely from France. The romance used classical or Arthurian sources in a poetic narrative that
replaced the heroic epics of feudal society, such as The Song of Roland, with a chivalrous tale of knightly valour.
• In the romance, complex themes of love, loyalty, and personal integrity were united with a quest for spiritual truth, an
amalgam that was represented in every major western European literature of the time. The love lyric has had a similarly 
heterogeneous background. The precise origins of courtly love are disputed, as is the influence of a popular love poetry
 tradition; it is clear, however, that the idealized lady and languishing suitor of the poets of southern and northern France
were imitated or reinterpreted throughout Europe—in the Sicilian school of Italy, the minnesingers (love poets) of
Germany, and in a Latin verse collection, Carmina Burana.
• The church not only established the purpose of literature but
preserved it. St. Benedict’s monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy was
established in 529,
• The classical Latin authors so preserved and the Latin works that continued to be written predominated over
vernacular works throughout most of the period. St. Augustine’s City of God, the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus, for example, were all written in Latin, as were most

major works in the fields of philosophy, theology, history, and science.

• Medieval drama began in the religious ceremonies that took place in
church on important dates in the Christian calendar. The dramatic quality of the
religious service lent itself to elaboration that perhaps first took the form of
gestures and mime and later developed into dramatic interpolations on
events or figures in the religious service. This elaboration
increased until drama became a secular affair performed on stages or
carts in town streets or open spaces.
• The players were guild craftsmen or professional actors and were hired by towns to perform at local or religious festivals. Three types of play developed: the mystery, the miracle, and the morality. The titles and themes of medieval drama remained
religious but their pieces’ titles can belie their humorous or farcical and sometimes bawdy nature. One of the best known morality plays was translated from Dutch to be known in English as Everyman. A large majority of medieval literature was anonymous
and not easily dated. Some of the greatest figures—Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—came late in the period, and their work convincingly demonstrates the transitional nature of the best of medieval literature, for, in being master commentators
of the medieval scene, they simultaneously announced the great themes and forms of Renaissance literature.
The Renaissance
• The name Renaissance (“Rebirth”) is given to the historical period in
Europe that succeeded the Middle Ages. The awakening of a
new spirit of intellectual and artistic inquiry,
which was the dominant feature of this
political, religious, and philosophical
phenomenon, was essentially a revival of the spirit of 
ancient Greece and Rome;
• in literature this meant a new interest in and analysis of the great classical writers. Scholars searched for and translated “lost” ancient texts, whose dissemination was much helped by developments in printing in Europe
from about 1450.
• Art and literature in the Renaissance reached a level unattained in any previous
period. The age was marked by three principal characteristics: first, the new
interest in learning, mirrored by the classical scholars known as humanists and
instrumental in providing suitable classical models for the new writers;
second, the new form of Christianity, initiated by the Protestant Reformation
 led by Martin Luther, which drew men’s attention to the individual and his inner
experiences and stimulated a response in Catholic countries summarized by the
term Counter-Reformation; third, the voyages of the great explorers that
culminated in Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America in 1492 and that had
far-reaching consequences on the countries that developed overseas empires, as
well as on the imaginations and consciences of the most gifted writers of the day.
• To these may be added many other factors, such as the developments in science
and astronomy and the political condition of Italy in the late 15th century. The
new freedom and spirit of inquiry
• in the Italian city-states had been a factor in encouraging the great precursors of the Renaissance in Italy, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The flowering of the Renaissance in France appeared both in the poetry of the poets making up the group known as the Pléiade and in the reflective
essays of Michel de Montaigne, while Spain at this time produced its greatest novelist, Miguel de Cervantes. Another figure who stood out above his contemporaries was the Portuguese epic poet Luís Camões, while drama flourished in both Spain and Portugal, being represented at its
best by Lope de Vega and Gil Vicente. In England, too, drama dominated the age, a blend of Renaissance learning and native tradition lending extraordinary vitality to works of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and others, while Shakespeare, England’s greatest dramatic
and poetic talent, massively spanned the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th.
• In the 16th century the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus typified the
development of humanism, which embodied the spirit of critical inquiry, regard
for classical learning, intolerance of superstition, and high respect for men as
God’s most intricate creation.
• An aspect of the influence of the Protestant Reformation on literature was the number of great translations of the Bible, including an early one by Erasmus, into vernacular languages during this period, setting new standards for prose writing. The  impetus of the Renaissance carried well
into the 17th century, when John Milton reflected the spirit of Christian humanism.
 The 17th Century
Challenging the accepted
• The 17th century was a period of unceasing disturbance and violent storms, no
less in literature than in politics and society. The Renaissance had prepared a
receptive environment essential to the dissemination of the ideas of the new
science and philosophy. The great question of the century, which confronted
serious writers from Donne to Dryden, was Michel de Montaigne’s “What do I
know?” or, in expanded terms, the ascertainment of the grounds and relations
of knowledge, faith, reason, and authority in religion, metaphysics, ethics,
politics, economics, and natural science.
• The questioning attitude
• that characterized the period is seen in the works of its great scientists and philosophers: Descartes’s Discourse on Method(1637) and Pascal’s Pensées (written 1657–58) in France; Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) and Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) in England. The importance of
these works has lain in their

• application of a skeptical, rationalist mode of thought not only to scientific

problems but to political and theological controversy and general problems of
understanding and perception. This fundamental challenge to both thought and
language had profound repercussions in man’s picture of himself and was reflected in what T.S. Eliot described as “the
dissociation of sensibility,” which Eliot claimed took root in England after the Civil War, whereby, in contrast to the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers who could “devour any kind of experience,” later poets in English could not think and feel in a unified way.
 Effects of conflict
• A true picture of the period must also take into account the enormous effect of
social and political upheavals during the early and middle parts of the century.
In England, where the literary history of the period is usually divided into two
parts, the break seems to fall naturally with the outbreak of the Civil War (1642–
51),
• marked by a closure of the theatres in 1642, and a new age beginning with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In France the bitter internecine struggle of the Fronde (1648–53) similarly divided the century and preceded possibly the greatest period
of all French literature—the age of Molière, Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine. In Germany the early part of the century was dominated by the religious and political conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and thereafter by the attempts of German
princes to emulate the central power and splendour of Louis XIV’s French court at Versailles. The Netherlands was also involved in the first part of the century in a struggle for independence from Spain (the Eighty Years’ War, 1568–1648) that resulted not
only in the achievement of this but also in the “Golden Age” of Dutch poetry—that of Henric Spieghel, Daniël Heinsius, and Gerbrand Bredero.
• The civil, political, and religious conflicts that dominated the first half of the
century were in many ways also the characteristic response of the 
Counter-Reformation. The pattern of religious conflict
• was reflected in literary forms and preoccupations. One reaction to this—seen particularly in Italy, Germany, and Spain but also in France and England—was the development of a style in art and literature known as  Baroque. This development manifested itself most characteristically in
the works of Giambattista Marino in Italy, Luis de Góngora in Spain, and Martin Opitz in Germany. Long regarded by many critics as decadent, Baroque literature is now viewed in a more favourable light and is understood to denote a style the chief characteristics of which are

• elaboration and ornament, the use of allegory, rhetoric, and daring artifice.

• If Baroque literature was the characteristic product of Italy and
Germany in this period, Metaphysical poetry was the most
outstanding feature in English verse of the first half of the century.
This term, first applied by Dryden to John Donne and expanded by 
Dr. Johnson, is now used to denote a range of poets who varied
greatly in their individual styles but who possessed certain affinities
 with Baroque literature, especially in the case of Richard Crashaw.
• Perhaps the most characteristic of all the disputes of the 17th century was that in which the tendency to continue to develop the Renaissance

• imitation of the classics came into conflict with the aspirations and discoveries

of new thinkers in science and philosophy and new experimenters with literary
forms.
• In France this appeared in a struggle between the Ancients and Moderns, between those who thought that literary style and subject should be modeled on classical Greek and Latin literature and supporters of native tradition. In Spain a similar conflict was
expressed in a tendency toward ornament, Latinization, and the classics (culteranismo) and that toward a more concise, profound, and epigrammatic style (conceptismo). This conflict heralded through the Moderns in France and the idea of conceptismo in
Spain a style of prose writing suitable to the new age of science and exploration. The Moderns in France were largely, therefore, followers of Descartes.

• In England a similar tendency was to be found in the work of the Royal Society

 in encouraging a simple language, a closer, naked, natural way of speaking,
suitable for rational discourse, paralleled by the great achievements in prose of 
John Milton and John Dryden.
 The 18th Century
• To call the 18th century the Age of Reason is to seize on a useful half-truth but to
cause confusion in the general picture, because the primacy of reason had also
been a mark of certain periods of the previous age. It is more accurate to say that
the 18th century was marked by two main impulses: reason and passion. The
respect paid to reason was shown in pursuit of order, symmetry, decorum, and
scientific knowledge; the cultivation of the
• feelings stimulated philanthropy, exaltation of personal relationships, religious
fervour, and the cult of sentiment, or sensibility. In literature the rational
impulse fostered satire, argument, wit, plain prose; the other inspired the 
psychological novel and the poetry of the sublime.
• The cult of wit, satire, and argument is evident in England in the writings of Alexander Pope, 
Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson, continuing the tradition of Dryden from the 17th century. The 
novel was established as a major art form in English literature partly by a rational realism shown in
the works of Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, and Tobias Smollett and partly by the psychological
probing of the novels of Samuel Richardson and of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In France the
major characteristic of the period lies in the philosophical and political writings of the
Enlightenment, which had a profound influence throughout the rest of Europe and foreshadowed
the French Revolution. Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles de Montesquieu, and the
Encyclopédistes Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert all devoted much of their writing to
controversies about social and religious matters, often involving direct conflict with the
authorities. In the first part of the century, German literature looked to English and French
models, although innovative advances were made by the dramatist and critic Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing. The great epoch of German literature came at the end of the century, when
cultivation of the feelings and of emotional grandeur found its most powerful expression in what
came to be called the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement. Associated with this were
two of the greatest names of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller,
both of whom in drama and poetry advanced far beyond the turbulence of Sturm und Drang.
The 19th Century
• The 19th century in Western literature—one of the most vital and
interesting periods of all—has special interest as the formative era
from which many modern literary conditions and tendencies derived.
Influences that had their origins or were in development in this period
—Romanticism, Symbolism, Realism—are reflected in the current of
modern literature, and many social and economic characteristics of
the 20th century were determined in the 19th.
 Romanticism
• The predominant literary movement of the early part of the 19th century was Romanticism,
which in literature had its origins in the Sturm und Drang period in Germany. An awareness
of this first phase of Romanticism is an important correction to the usual idea of Romantic
 literature as something that began in English poetry with William Wordsworth and 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Moreover, although it
is true that the French Revolution of 1789 and the Industrial Revolution were two main
political and social factors affecting the Romantic poets of early 19th-century England, many
characteristics of Romanticism in literature sprang from literary or philosophical sources. A
philosophical background was provided in the 18th century chiefly by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, whose emphasis on the individual and the power of inspiration influenced Wordsworth and
also such first-phase Romantic writers as Friedrich Hölderlin and Ludwig Tieck in Germany
and the French writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, whose Paul et Virginie (1787) anticipated
some of the sentimental excesses of 19th-century Romantic literature. Positive as it was, the
influence of Rousseau must also be seen as a partly negative reaction against 18th-century
rationalism with its emphasis on intellect.
• Belief in self-knowledge was, indeed, a principal article of Romantic faith. Late 18th-
century French writers such as Fabre d’Olivet sought to explain the physical world by
an idea of a “breath of life” similar to the “inspiration” of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
The Romantics believed that the real truth of things could be explained only through
examination of their own emotions in the context of nature and the primitive.
Because of this emphasis on inspiration, the poet came to assume a central role—
that of seer and visionary. Simultaneously, such formal conventions as imitation of
the classics were rejected as binding rules. A new directness of the poet’s role
emphasized the language of the heart and of ordinary men, and Wordsworth even
tried to invent a new simplified diction. Poetry became divorced from its 18th-
century social context, and a poet was answerable only to ultimate truth and himself.
Two classic poses of the Romantic poet were the mystic visionary of John Keats and
the superman of Lord Byron—indeed, satirization of the Byronic hero was to become
a theme of later novelists such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, even though he himself had
Romantic antecedents.
• The fact that Dostoyevsky was a Russian showed how the Romantic stream flowed across Europe.
In Spain and Italy, Hungary, Poland, and the Balkans, it took the form of drama, which in England
failed to produce great works. The early and middle 19th century was a time of poetry and prose
rather than of drama. The Romantic style in poetry was seen everywhere in Europe—in José de
Espronceda in Spain; Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy, where it became identified with
nationalist sentiments; Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; Adam Mickiewicz in
Poland. In America, a Romantic thread also allied with the emergence of national feeling could be
seen in the adventurous stories of James Fenimore Cooper; in the supernatural and mystic
element in Edgar Allan Poe; in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and
in the Transcendentalist theories of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, which, as
Wordsworth’s pronouncements had done, affirmed the power of “insight” to transcend ordinary
logic and experience.
• The impetus of Romantic poetry began to slacken after about 1830 and gave way to more
objective styles, although many of its themes and devices, such as the misunderstood artist or the
unhappy lover, continued to be employed.
Post-Romanticism
• Arguably the first post-Romantic poet was a German, Heinrich Heine, but German poetry in the
mid-19th century mostly followed Wordsworth, though new tendencies were to be found in 
August von Platen Hallermünde and an Austrian, Nikolaus Lenau. The principal development was
to be seen in France in the growth of a movement known as Parnassianism. Originating with 
Théophile Gautier, Parnassianism in some ways was an offshoot of Romanticism rather than a
reaction against it. In concentrating on the purely formal elements of poetry, on aesthetics, and
on “art for art’s sake,” it changed the direction of French poetry and had much influence abroad.
Its most illustrious representative was Charles Baudelaire, who believed that “everything that is
not art is ugly and useless.” Another branch of new development was the growth of 
Impressionism and the Symbolist movement, a result of “borrowing” from movements in
painting, sculpture, and music. Paul Verlaine, foremost of the Impressionists, used suggestion,
atmosphere, and fleeting rhythms to achieve his effects. Symbolism, a selective use of words and
images to evoke tenuous moods and meanings, is conveyed in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé
 and Arthur Rimbaud. The advance of French poetry in the middle and later part of the century
was an achievement of individuals, based on invention of a personal idiom.
• The spread of education and, in England, of circulating libraries increased a
demand for novels. At the beginning of the 19th century Jane Austen had already
satirized the excesses of the Gothic novel, a harbinger of medievalizing
Romanticism in the latter part of the 18th century, in Northanger Abbey and the
conflict of sense and Romantic sensibility in Sense and Sensibility. In France the
conflict of intelligence and emotion appeared in the work of Benjamin Constant
 (Adolphe, 1816) and most notably in Le Rouge et le noir (1830) of Stendhal and
later in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). The detailed verbal
scrupulousness and Realism exhibited in the work of Flaubert and of Honoré
de Balzac were carried forward by Guy de Maupassant in France and Giovanni
Verga in Italy; they culminated in the extreme Naturalism of Émile Zola, who
described his prose in novels such as Thérèse Raquin (1867) as “literary surgical
autopsy.”
• But Realism and nationalism seem irrelevant as descriptions of the great writers of the
period—for example, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy in England and 
Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekhov in
Russia. In such writers there was a distinct bias toward literature with a social purpose,
stimulated by awakening forces of liberalism, humanism, and socialism in many Western
countries.
• A decline of the Romantic theatre into melodrama was fairly general in Europe, and it was
slower than the novel to take up problems of contemporary life. When revival came,
through the work of a Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, Romantic conflicts of visionary and realist,
individual and society were restated, and this was true also of the plays of 
August Strindberg in Sweden. In Russia a modern theatre became a vital influence that
could trace its beginnings back to Gogol’s Government Inspector(1836) but was to be felt
later in the century in Turgenev’s Month in the Country (1850) and, above all, in the work of
Anton Chekhov, a great dramatist of the period.
The 20th Century
• When the 20th century began, social and cultural conditions that prevailed
in Europe and America were not too different from those of the middle and
late 19th century. Continuity could be seen, for example, in the work of four
novelists writing in English at the turn of the century and after. 
Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence all
demonstrated in the progress of their work the transition from a relatively
stable world at the end of the 19th century to a new age that began with 
World War I. The awakening of a new consciousness in literature was also to
be traced in such works of fiction as the first volume of Marcel Proust’s
 Remembrance of Things Past (Swann’s Way, 1913), André Gide’s Vatican
Cellars (1914), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Franz Kafka’s Trial (published
posthumously in 1925), and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924).
• Various influences that characterized much of the writing from the 1920s were at work in these
writers. An interest in the unconscious and the irrational was reflected in their work and that of
others of about this time. Two important sources of this influence were Friedrich Nietzsche, a
German philosopher to whom both Gide and Mann, for example, were much indebted, and 
Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytical works, by the 1920s, had had a telling influence on
Western intellectuals. A shift away from 19th-century assumptions and styles was not limited to
writers of fiction. André Breton’s first Manifeste du surréalisme (1924; “Manifesto of
Surrealism”) was the first formal statement of a movement that called for spontaneity and a
complete rupture with tradition. Surrealism showed the influence of Freud in its emphasis on
dreams, automatic writing, and other antilogical methods and, although short-lived as a formal
movement, had a lasting effect on much 20th-century art and poetry. The uncertainty of the
new age and the variety of attempts to deal with it and give it some artistic coherence can be
seen also in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923); in T.S.
Eliot’s Waste Land (1922); and in Luigi Pirandello’s play about the instability of identity, Henry
IV (1922).
• The international and experimental period of Western literature in the 1910s and
1920s was important not only for the great works it produced but also because it
set a pattern for the future. What was clearly revealed in the major works of the
period was an increasing sense of crisis and urgency, doubts as to the 19th
century’s faith in the psychological stability of the individual personality, and a
deep questioning of all philosophical or religious solutions to human problems. In
the 1930s these qualities of 20th-century thought were not abandoned but,
rather, were expanded into a political context, as writers divided into those
supporting political commitment in their writing and those reacting conservatively
against such a domination of art by politics. Nor did World War II resolve the
debate concerning political commitment—issues similar to those that exercised
major creative imaginations of the 1930s were still very much alive during the last
quarter of the century.
• It would be tempting to explain what seemed to be a relative scarcity of great writers in the period after
World War II as an inevitable result of the cumulative pressure of disturbing social and technological
developments accelerated by that war. Under such fluctuating and doubtful circumstances, it would not
seem altogether strange if writing and reading, as traditionally understood, should cease. Indeed, in
certain technologically highly developed countries, such as the United States, the printed word itself
seemed to some critics to have lost its central position, having been displaced in the popular mind by a
visual and aural electronic culture that did not need the active intellectual participation of its audience.
Thus the communications media that helped to create something resembling an international popular
culture in many Western countries did nothing to make the question of literary value easier to answer.
Given the extraordinary conditions in which a modern writer works, it was not surprising that reputations
were difficult to judge, that radical experimentation characterized many fields of literature, and that
traditional forms of writing were losing their definition and were tending to dissolve into one another.
Novels might acquire many features of poetry or be transformed into a kind of heightened nonfictional 
reportage, while experimentation with typography gave poems an appearance of verbal paintings, and
dramatic works, shorn of anything resembling a traditional plot, became a series of carefully orchestrated
gestures or events. But formal experimentation was only part of the picture, and to say that modern
writing since World War II has been primarily experimental would be to ignore other characteristics that
writing acquired earlier in the century and that still continued to be issues. Most good critics felt that there
was no lack of good literature being written, despite the lack of major reputations and despite the possibly
transitional nature of much of the period’s work in its variety of styles and subjects.
Romance languages
• Romance languages, group of related languages all derived from 
Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the 
Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major
French, Italian, 
languages of the family include 
Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, all national
languages.