The History of World

Literature
1000 BC - Present
 What is it?
• The vast literary production and what is
deemed the best across the world

• From the premodern age to the 21st century,

humanity has an unquenchable thirst for self-
expression that has led to immortalize the
human experience.
• World literature is the story of us a species.
 800BC-400BC: Ancient Greek Literature

• Forms the basis of liberal arts education, and

has been taught since organized education
began. Includes philosophical treatises, epic
poetry, myths and plays.
• Aristotle, Poetics
• Plato, The Apology
• Sophocles, Antigone
• Homer, The Illiad & The Odyssey
450-1066: Anglo-Saxon (Old English) Literature

• Primarily consists of poems already circulating

in oral form at the time they were first written
down. The bulk of the prose literature is
historical or religious in nature.
• Beowulf
1066-1500: Middle English Literature
• The transitional period between Anglo-Saxon
and modern English literature. This time
period saw a flowering of secular literature,
including ballads and allegorical poems.
• Petrarch Petrarchan sonnets
• Dante Aligheri The Divine Comedy
• Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales
 1500-1660: The Renaissance

• Influenced by the artistic and cultural Renaissance,

the transformation of both English language and
literature in this period can be seen to move away
from the medieval Middle English literature period
and into the more recognizably modern Elizabethan
literature.
• The period is characterized by the influence of the
classics (in literature, language, and philosophy), as
well as an optimistic forward-thinking approach to
the potential of humans.
 The Renaissance (cont’d)
• Miguel Cervantes Don Quixote,
• William Shakespeare plays & sonnets
• Christopher Marlowe Dr. Faustus, pastoral
poetry
• Ben Jonson satirical plays & lyric poetry
• John Donne metaphysical poetry
• Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queen
• John Milton Paradise Lost
 1660-1785: Neoclassicism

• A movement whose artists looked to the

classical texts for their creative inspiration in
an effort to imitate classical form. The writers
in particular drew on what were considered to
be classical virtues—simplicity, order, restraint,
logic, economy, accuracy, and decorum—to
produce prose, poetry, and drama. Literature
was of value in accordance with its ability to
not only delight, but also instruct.
 Neoclassicism (cont’d)
• Voltaire Candide
• Alexander Pope epic and narrative poetry,
heroic couplet
• Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe
• Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
1650 - 1730: Puritan Literature/Puritan Plain
Style (United States)
• In Puritan literature, the writers' purpose is to
show how God works in their lives. Plain style
writing avoids irony, humor, hyperbole, and any
literary device that might keep the reader from
understanding the writer's purpose.
• Anne Bradstreet To My Dear and Loving Husband
• Edward Taylor Huswifery
• Jonathan Edwards Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God
1730-1800: The Age of Reason (United States)

• The 18th-century American “Age of Reason” was a

movement marked by an emphasis on rationality
rather than religious tradition. It’s foremost
thinkers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson,
also served as political leaders of the American
Revolution. Some of the most noteworthy
characteristics of this movement were:
• constructive deism — the belief that Reason leads us
to some basic religious truths and that morality is an
intellectual pursuit rather than a religious one.
1730-1800: The Age of Reason (United States)
• scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning
religious dogma
• representative government in place of
monarchy.
• emphasis on ideals of justice, liberty, and
equality as the natural rights of man
• intellectual pursuit is the highest form of
human consciousness. Faith in human
goodness and dignity of humankind.
 1785-1830: Romanticism
• Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement
that originated in late 18th century Western Europe
and quickly spread to America. Some of the main
underlying ideas of the movement are:
• The idea that neither theism nor deism can adequately
answer the question of man’s relationship with God.
• The belief in the natural goodness of man and the idea
that man, in a state of nature, would behave well but is
hindered by civilization.
 1785-1830: Romanticism
• A revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of
the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the
rationalization of nature, in art and literature.
• Influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly
that the past is the key to the present.
• Romantic artists wished to move away from the formality
of the previous generation. Strong emotion became a
source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on
such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe
experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature.
 Romanticism (cont’d)
British Poetry
• William Blake
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Lord Byron
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• John Keats
• Alfred Lord Tennyson

British Literature
• Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
• Mary Shelley Frankenstein

American Literature
• Washington Irving Rip Van Winkle
• James Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans
 1830-1900: The Victorian Period

• Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits

of difficult lives in which hard work,
perseverance, love and luck win out in the
end; virtue would be rewarded and
wrongdoers are suitably punished. They often
contain a central moral lesson or theme.
 Victorian Period (cont’d)
World Literature
• Henrik Ibsen A Doll’s House
• Victor Hugo Les Miserables
• Gustave Flaubet Madame Bovary
 
British Victorian Poetry
• Robert Browning
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 
British Victorian Literature
• Charlotte BronteJane Eyre
• Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
• Charles Dickens Great Expectations
 1830-1865: American Renaissance

• A period during which American literature came of age as an

expression of a national spirit. These authors utilized native
dialect, history, landscape, and characters in order to
explore uniquely American issues. Critics regard some of
the short fiction produced during the American Renaissance
as some of the best American fiction ever written.
• Emily Dickinson poetry
• Walt Whitman poetry
• Herman MelvilleMoby Dick & Billy Budd
• Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
 1835-1860: Transcendentalism

• The American Renaissance was closely associated

with an intellectual movement known as
Transcendentalism, a philosophy or system of
thought based on the idea that humans are
essentially good, that humanity's deepest truths
may be formulated through insight rather than logic,
and that there is an essential unity to all of creation.
• Ralph Waldo EmersonNature & Self Reliance
• Henry David Thoreau Walden & Civil Disobedience
 1855-1900: American Realism & Regionalism

• A literary movement that attempted to portray an

accurate, detailed picture of ordinary, contemporary
life. Some of its main ideas were:
• Character is more important than action and plot:
complex ethical choices are often the subject.
• Humans control their destinies: characters act on
their environment rather than simply reacting to it.
• Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail:
Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on
verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made
plot.
 1855-1900: American Realism & Regionalism

• Events will usually be plausible: Realistic novels avoid the

sensational, dramatic elements of the Romantic movement.
• Class is important: primarily, the interests and aspirations
of an insurgent middle class.
• Diction is the natural vernacular: not heightened or poetic;
tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.
• The use of symbolism is controlled and limited: the realists
depend more on the use of images.

• Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• Kate Chopin The Awakening
 1890-1910: Naturalism
(United States)
• Naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply
scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of
human beings. It focuses on the "brute within" each individual,
comprised of strong and often warring emotions: passions such as
lust and greed, the desire for dominance or pleasure, and the fight
for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. Naturalist authors
viewed nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human
beings.

• Jack London The Call of the Wild

• Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie
• Edith Wharton Ethan Frome
 1900-1940: Modernism

• Modernism provided a radical break with

traditional modes of literature. Its main
characteristics were stylistic innovations -
disruption of traditional syntax and form – and
an obsession with primitive attitudes
(violence, self-centeredness)
 1918-1940: The Lost Generation

• A term used to describe the generation of writers,

many of them soldiers, who published in the years
following WW I. These authors were said to be
disillusioned by the large number of casualties of
the First World War, cynical, disdainful of the
antiquated notions of morality and propriety of
their elders and ambivalent about gender ideals.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
• Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
 1918-1930: The Harlem Renaissance

• An explosion of African-American literature, art and music during

the 1920’s. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance represented the
first generation of African-Americans to receive a formal
education, and their ascendance was predicted by author W.E.B.
DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk: "One ever feels his twoness - an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
stirrings: two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

• Langston Hughes poet

• Claude McKay poet
• Zora Neale HurstonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
 1945-Present: Postmodernism

• Because the postmodernism movement

continues to this day, the period’s definition is
constantly changing.
• Unlike Modernism, Postmodernism has no
crisis of belief in traditional authority.
Modernist “angst” has been replaced with an
"anything and everything goes" attitude.
 1945-Present: Postmodernism

• Instead of seeking larger truths that appeal to a wide

audience, literature seeks little truths that hopefully mean
something to a portion of its readers.
• Postmodernist literature doesn't believe there's a “real
real” to represent –everything is a perspective.
• Experimentation with form is no longer considered radical,
as in modernism. Rather, experimentation with
conventional forms is the norm--the convention--in
postmodernism. Postmodernist authors aggressively
attempt to mix of forms, genres, disciplines, and systems all
within one work.
 Postmodernism (cont’d)
Some of the main ideas of the Postmodern movement are:

• Inaugurated by the Bomb

Psychological effects of Post-Hiroshima America
The Nuclear Age
• New Forms of War
Wars over political ideology (Korea, Vietnam)
Transition from world wars to cold wars & civil wars
Conceptual wars: Drugs, terrorism
• The rise of multinationalism & capitalism
Global village
Global economy
• Multiculturalism
Minorities
Women
Confessional Poetry
• Decline of industry & rise of the Information Age
Internet/Video Games
Technoculture & Hyperreality
 1948-1960: The Beat Generation

• The Beat Generation is a term used to describe both a group

of American writers who came to prominence in the late
1950s and early 1960s and the cultural phenomena that
they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called
"beatniks”). Beat Generation literature highlighted the core
values of the movement: spontaneity, open emotion, visceral
engagement in gritty worldly experiences.

• Allen Ginsberg Howl (1956)

• William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch (1959)
• Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
 1958-1965: Confessional Poetry

• Confessional poetry is defined as “the poetry of the

personal”. The confessional poetry of the mid-
twentieth century dealt with subject matter that
previously had not been openly discussed in
American poetry. Private experiences with and
feelings about death, trauma, depression and
relationships were addressed in this type of poetry,
often in an autobiographical manner.
• Robert LowellSkunk Hour, Father’s Bedroom
• Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar
 1930s-Present: Magic Realism
• Magic realism is a type of fiction in which magical
elements are blended into a realistic atmosphere in
order to access a deeper understanding of reality.
These magical elements are explained like normal
occurrences that are presented in a straightforward
manner which allows the "real" and the "fantastic"
to be accepted in the same stream of thought.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez Love in the Time of
Cholera
• Laura Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate
 1950s-Present: Postcolonial Literature

• Literature by and about authors from former

European colonies, primarily from Africa, Asia,
South America and the Carribean. This
literature aims to challenge Eurocentric
assumptions through intense examination of
culture and identity.
• Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
• Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children
 1960’s-Present: Metafiction
• Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously
addresses the devices of fiction, constantly reminding the
reader that he or she is reading a fictional work. Some
examples of metafiction are:
• A novel about a person writing a novel
• A novel about a person reading a novel
• A novel in which the author is a character
• Characters who express awareness that they are in a work
of fiction. (also known as breaking the fourth wall.)
• A work of fiction within a fiction.
• Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
• Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried