Lit.

200 – Literature of the World

* The History of World Literature

* Model for Literary Communication

Professor: Angilly C. Librea, LPT, MAEd-ELT

A Model for Literary Communication
• literary texts only come to life when they are actually
received by a readership.
• least two participants: someone who writes a literary
text and someone who reads it.
• The literary text itself functions as message between
author and reader.
• authors follow literary conventions when they create a
piece of literature or they deliberately defy these
conventions to create something new and innovative.
• author and reader must share a language for
communication to work at all; rules for writing and
reading texts. (i.e. code)
• Reference is a term used in linguistics to denote the
relationship between a sign and the object it signifies.
 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
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Bronte Jane 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 Melville Moby 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 Emerson Nature & 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 Hurston Their 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.
• 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.
 1945-Present: Postmodernism
• Postmodernist literature doesn't believe there's
a “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
 Postmodernism (cont’d)
Some of the main ideas of the Postmodern movement are:

• 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 Lowell Skunk 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
 Summary
• A division into literary periods is useful for our
understanding and discussion of connections
between literary and socio-historical
developments. They help us compare texts
within one period and also across periods.
Good books on literary history set out very
clearly right from the beginning what their
motivating force is and why they arrived at a
certain form of periodisation.
References:

Diyanni, R. (2002). Literature (5thed.). NY, USA: McGraw Hill Higher

Education. (Available at the SPC library)

https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Periods_Lit_History.pdf, Retrieved on
January 27, 2019