Literary Genres, Traditions, and Forms from Different Cultures

Topics under this module

 English Literature
 American Literature
 European Literature
 Latin American Literature
 Asian Literature
 African Literature

English Literature

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 name some well-known English writers and their works as well as the body of English
literature to which they belong; and
 analyze a few selected literary works representative of English literature.

Who are some of the important writers in the English literature?

Why are they important?
What literary forms are prominent in English literature?

Let's Review!

 Epic poem - This is a long narrative poem usually about a hero and his deeds. A well-
known example is Beowulf .
 Sonnet - This poem has fourteen lines that follow a rhyme scheme. A well-known
example is Sonnet 18 of William Shakespeare. It starts with the famous line, “Shall I
compare thee to a summer's day?”
 Drama - This piece of writing tells a story through dialogue, and it is performed on stage.
A well-known example is The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.
 Novel - This is a long prose narrative usually about fictional characters and events, which
are told in a particular sequence.

Learn about it!

English Literature

English literature is one of the richest, most developed, and most important bodies of literature
in the world. It encompasses both written and spoken works by writers from the United
Kingdom.
Old English Literature (600 - 1100)

Old English, the earliest form of the English language, was spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, a
Germanic tribe living in Britain during the fifth century. One significant work written in Old
English is Beowulf , the longest epic poem in Old English. It is known for its use of kennings,
which are phrases or compound words used to name persons, places, and things indirectly.

Middle English Literature (1100 - 1500)

Middle English is a blend of Old English and Norman French, the French dialect spoken by the
Normans (people of Normandy). The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of
English literature, is a fine example of literature written in Middle English.

Elizabethan Literature (1558 - 1603)

The Elizabethan period is the golden age of English literature. Also, it is the golden age of
drama. Known as the “Bard of Avon,” William Shakespeare wrote his plays during the period.
His best plays include Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice . Also,
he wrote 154 sonnets, many of which are the best loved and the most widely-read poems in the
English literature.

The Romantic Period (1800 - 1837)

This period is the golden age of lyric poetry. Poetry became the expression of the poet's personal
feelings and emotions. A few notable works of poetry of the period are Songs of Innocence and
of Experience by William Blake, Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, The Eve of St. Agnes , and Other Poems by John Keats, “Don Juan” by Lord Byron,
and “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The Victorian Period (1837 - 1900)

The period saw the rise of the novel. Charles Dickens, considered to be the greatest English
novelist of the 19th century, wrote Great Expectations . This novel was published as a serial in a
weekly periodical from December 1860 to August 1861.

Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning each wrote fine poetry during the period.
Tennyson's In Memoriam AHH is a requiem for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. It is widely
considered to be one of the great poems of the 19th century. Browning, who is known for his
dramatic monologues, wrote the famous poem “My Last Duchess.” In a dramatic monologue, the
poet addresses an audience through an assumed voice.

Oscar Wilde is the best dramatist of the period. He wrote the masterpiece The Importance of
Being Earnest .
Twentieth Century (1900 - 2000)

William Butler Yeats and Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote Modernist poems during the period. Yeats
wrote The Tower, The Winding Stair, and New Poems , all of which are known to have powerful
images. Eliot's masterpieces are “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land.”

Virginia Woolf in her story Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce in their work Ulysses use stream of
consciousness, a literary technique in which the flow of thoughts of a character is described in
words.

Beowulf (An Excerpt)

LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings

of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a founding, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve, till before him the folk, both far and near,
who housed by the whale-path , heard his command, gave him gifts: a good king he!
To him an heir was afterward born,
a son in his halls, whom heaven sent
to favor the folk, feeling their woe
that first they had lacked an earl for leader
so long a while; the Lord endowed him,
the Wielder of Wonder, with world's renowned.
Famed was this Beowulf: far flew the boast of him, son of Scyld, in the Scandian lands.

My Last Duchess (An Excerpt)

By Robert Browning

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Sonnet 18
By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often his gold complexion is dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But your eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee

Summary
English literature is a very large body of diverse literature that encompasses works by writers from the
United Kingdom.
American Literature

Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 name some well-known American writers of the 19th and 20th centuries and their works; and
 analyze a few selected literary works representative of American Literature.

Who are some of the important American writers during the 19th and 20th centuries?
Why are they important?
What literary forms are prominent in American literature?

American Literature

American literature refers to all works of literature in English produced in the United States.

The 19th Century

 William Cullen Bryant (1794 - 1878) became famous for “Thanatopsis” (1817). This
poem marked a new beginning for American poetry.
 Washington Irving (1783 - 1859) was known for “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow,” the first American short stories. They were part of his work The Sketch
Book , the first American work to become successful internationally.
 Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849) became famous for his macabre stories like “The Fall of
the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846). Also, he wrote “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), the first detective story, and the poem “Raven”
(1845), with which he achieved instant fame.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864) became known for his symbolical such as “The
Hollow of the Three Hills” (1830) and “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). Also, he wrote
the gothic romance The Scarlet Letter (1850).
 Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) became well-known for Leaves of Grass , first published in
1855. In this poetry collection, Whitman showed the experiences of the common man.
 Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) wrote odd poems. She mostly used the imperfect rhyme
and avoided regular rhythms. A collection of her poems, Poems by Emily Dickinson ,
came out in 1890.

American Literature

American literature refers to all works of literature in English produced in the United States.
The 19th Century

 William Cullen Bryant (1794 - 1878) became famous for “Thanatopsis” (1817). This
poem marked a new beginning for American poetry.
 Washington Irving (1783 - 1859) was known for “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow,” the first American short stories. They were part of his work The Sketch
Book , the first American work to become successful internationally.
 Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849) became famous for his macabre stories like “The Fall of
the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846). Also, he wrote “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), the first detective story, and the poem “Raven”
(1845), with which he achieved instant fame.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864) became known for his symbolical such as “The
Hollow of the Three Hills” (1830) and “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). Also, he wrote
the gothic romance The Scarlet Letter (1850).
 Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) became well-known for Leaves of Grass , first published in
1855. In this poetry collection, Whitman showed the experiences of the common man.
 Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) wrote odd poems. She mostly used the imperfect rhyme
and avoided regular rhythms. A collection of her poems, Poems by Emily Dickinson ,
came out in 1890.

The 20th Century

 Robert Frost (1874 - 1963) wrote poems with traditional stanzas and a blank verse, a
verse in iambic pentameter with no rhyme. His poems portray ordinary people in
everyday situations like “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “After Apple-
Picking,” both of which were published in 1914.
 AND. AND. Cummings (1894 - 1962) was known for his unconventional punctuation
and phrasing. His poems were compiled in Complete Poems (1968).
 Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) was a leader of the Imagists, who emphasized the use of direct
and sparse language and precise images in writing poetry. Two of his works are Ripostes
(1912) and Lustra (1916).
 Sherwood Anderson (1876 - 1941) wrote prose using everyday speech. His best works
appeared in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Death in the Woods (1933).
 Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) was known for his succinct writing, which was widely
imitated. His writing was very simple and objective - not verbose and sentimental. Two
of his finest stories are “The Killers” (1927) and “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber” (1936).
 Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997) was known for his work “Howl” (1956), a poem with
incantatory rhythms and raw emotion. He was one of the Beat poets, who aimed to bring
poetry back to the streets.
 Anne Sexton (1928 - 1974) became known for her confessional poetry, a kind of poetry
that deals with the private experiences of the speaker. Her work Live or Die (1966) won a
Pulitzer Prize.
The Killers (An Excerpt)
By Ernest Hemingway

The door of Henry's lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.
"What's yours?" George asked them.
"I don't know," one of the men said.
"What do you want to eat, Al?"
“I don't know," said Al.
"I don't know what I want to eat."
Outside it was getting dark. The streetlight came on outside the window. The two men at the
counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had
been talking to George when they came in.
"I'll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potato," the first man said.
"It isn't ready yet."
"What the hell do you put it on the card for?"
"That's the dinner," George explained. "You can get that at six o'clock."
George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter.
"It's five o'clock."
"The clock says twenty minutes past five," the second man said.
"It's twenty minutes past."
"Oh, to hell with the clock," the first man said.
"What have you got to eat?"
"I can give you any kind of sandwiches," George said. "You can have ham and eggs, bacon and
eggs, liver and bacon, or a steak."

Wanting to Die (An Excerpt)

By Anne Sexton

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.

I walk in my clothes, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost nameless lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.

I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language .

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build

Mending Wall (An Excerpt)

By Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass open.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.

Because I couldn't stop for Death (An Excerpt)

By Emily Dickinson

Because I couldn't stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

The Cask of Amontillado (An Excerpt)

By Edgar Allan Poe

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult,
I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that
I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely settled

but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded the idea of risk. I must not only
punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its
redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him
who has done the wrong.

Summary

American literature is a rich body of literature. It refers to all works of literature in English
published in the United States, which has produced many great writers through the centuries.
European Literature

Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 name some writers and their literary works under European Literature, and
 analyze a few selected literary works representative of the literature it belongs.

What are some literary pieces included in European Literature?

Who are some of the greatest writers in each literature?
What important works did they produce?

Learn about it!

European Literature , also called Western Literature, refers to literature in the Indo-European
languages including Latin, Greek, the Romance languages, and Russian. It is considered as the
largest body of literature in the world.

Latin Literature

 Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BCE–43 BCE) was the greatest Roman orator. The first part of the
Golden Age of Latin Literature (70 BC–AD 18) is named after him, the Ciceronian period (70–43
BC). Using Latin as a literary medium, he was able to express abstract and complicated thoughts
clearly in his speeches. One of his well-known speeches is Pro Cluentio .
 Virgil (70 BCE–19 BCE), the greatest Roman poet, was known for Aeneid , an epic poem. He
wrote it during the Augustan Age (43 BC–AD 18), the second part of the Golden Age.

Greek Literature

 Homer is known for the The Iliad and the The Odyssey . These epics are about the heroic
achievements of Achilles and Odysseus, respectively.
 Sophocles (496 BC–406 BC) was a tragic playwright. He was known for Oedipus the King , which
marks the highest level of achievement of Greek drama.

Italian Literature

 Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304–1374) perfected the Italian sonnet, a major influence on
European poetry. Written in the vernacular, his sonnets were published in the Canzoniere .
 Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) is known for Decameron , a classic Italian masterpiece. The
stories were written in the vernacular.
Spanish Literature

 Two well-known Spanish writers of Siglo De Oro (1500–1681) are Miguel de Cervantes (1547–
1616) and Lope de Vega (1562–1635).
 Miguel de Cervantes was known for his novel Don Quixote , one of the most widely read works
of Western Literature. Its titular character's name is the origin of the word “quixotic,” meaning
hopeful or romantic in a way that is not practical.
 Lope de Vega , an outstanding dramatist, wrote as many as 1800 plays during his lifetime,
including cloak and sword drama, which are plays of upper middle class manners and intrigue.

French Literature

 Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), a novelist, was a major influence on the realist school. His
masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857), marked the beginning of a new age of realism.
 Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) is considered the greatest French short story writer. At
Naturalist, he wrote objective stories which presented a real “slice of life.”

Russian literature

 Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) is known for his novels War and Peace (1865–1869) and Anna
Karenina (1875–1877). A master of realistic fiction, he is considered as one of the world's
greatest novelists.
 Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) is a master of the modern short story and a Russian playwright. His
works such as, "The Bet" and "The Misfortune" reveal his clinical approach to ordinary life.

The Necklace (An Excerpt)

By Guy de Maupassant

She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as though fate had blurred over her, into a
family of artisans. She had no marriage portion, no expectations, no means of getting known,
understood, loved, and wedded by a man of wealth and distinction; and she let herself be married
off to a little clerk in the Ministry of Education. Her tastes were simple because she had never
been able to afford any other, but she was as unhappy as though she had married beneath her; for
women have no caste or class, their beauty, grace, and charm serving them for birth or family,
their natural delicacy, their instinctive elegance, their nimbleness of wit, are their only mark of
rank, and put the slum girl on a level with the highest lady in the land.

God Sees the Truth But Waits (An Excerpt)

By Leo Tolstoy

"What more do you want from me?" asked Aksionov. "Why have you come here?"
Makar Semyonich was silent. So Aksionov sat up and said, "What do you want? Go away, or I
will call the guard!"

Makar Semyonich bent close over Aksionov, and whispered, "Ivan Dmitrich, forgive me!"

"What for?" asked Aksionov.

"It was I who killed the merchant and hid the knife among your things. "I meant to kill you too,
but I heard a noise outside, so I hid the knife in your bag and escaped out of the window."

Aksionov was silent, and did not know what to say. Makar Semyonich slid off the bed-shelf and
knelt upon the ground. "Ivan Dmitrich," said he, "forgive me! For the love of God, forgive me! I
will confess that it was I who killed the merchant, and you will be released and can go to your
home."

"It is easy for you to talk," said Aksionov, "but I have suffered for you these twenty-six years.
Where could I go now? . . . My wife is dead, and my children have forgotten me. I have nowhere
to go. . ."

Makar Semyonich did not rise, but beat his head on the floor. "Ivan Dmitrich, forgive me!" I
have cried. "When they flogged me with the knot it was not so hard to bear as it is to see you
now. . . yet you had pity on me, and did not tell. For Christ's sake forgive me, wretch that I am!"
And he began to sob.

When Aksionov heard him sobbing he, too, began to weep. "God will forgive you!" said he.
"Maybe I am a hundred times worse than you." And at these words his heart grew light, and the
longing for home left him. He no longer had any desire to leave the prison, but only hoped for
his last hour to come.

In spite of what Aksionov had said, Makar Semyonich confessed, his guilt. But when the order
for his release came, Aksionov was already dead.

God Sees the Truth But Waits (An Excerpt)

By Leo Tolstoy

In the town of Vladimir lived a young merchant named Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov. He had two
shops and a house of his own.

Aksionov was a handsome, fair-haired, curly-headed fellow, full of fun, and very fond of
singing. When quite a young man he had been given to drink, and he was riotous when he had
had too much; but after he married he gave up drinking, except now and then.

One summer Aksionov was going to the Nizhny Fair, and as he bade good-bye to his family, his
wife said to him, "Ivan Dmitrich, do not start to-day; I have had a bad dream about you."

Aksionov laughed, and said, "You are afraid that when I get to the fair I shall go on a spree."
His wife replied: "I do not know what I am afraid of; all I know is that I had a bad dream. I
dreamt you returned from the town, and when you took off your cap I saw that your hair was
quite grey."

Aksionov laughed. "That's a lucky sign," he said. "See if I don't sell out all my goods, and bring
you some presents from the fair."

So he said good-bye to his family, and drove away.

Summary

European Literature refers to literatures in the Indo-European languages. It is considered as the

largest body of literature in the world.

Latin American Literature

Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

 name some well-known Latin American writers of the 20th century and their works, and
 analyze two selected literary works representative of the period.

What is Latin American literature?

Who are some well-known Latin American writers of the 20th Century and what did they write?

Latin American Literature

Latin American Literature refers to all works of literature in Latin American countries like
Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia, and Peru.

The Vanguard

 The Vanguardia (avant-garde in English) took place in Latin America between

approximately 1916 and 1935. It collectively referred to different literary movements.
Four of those were the following:
o Creationism, founded by Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948), a Chilean poet, in 1916
o Ultraism, introduced to South America by Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), an Argentine
writer, in 1921
o Estridentismo, founded in Mexico City by Manuel Maples Arce (1898–1981), a Mexican
writer, in 1921
 o Surrealism, which is said to have started in Argentina when the Argentinian poet Aldo
Pellegrini (1903–1973) launched the first Surrealist magazine in 1928

 Surrealism , an art form that combines unrelated images or events in a very strange and
dreamlike way, became a major influence in Latin American Literature throughout the
20th century.
 Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), a Chilean poet, wrote Residence on Earth (1933), a
collection of poetry inspired by surrealism.
 Octavio Paz (1914–1998), a Mexican poet, wrote poems with surrealist imagery. His
major works were published in Freedom Under Parole (1960).
 Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was known for his fantastic stories, published later as a
collection entitled Ficciones (1944).
 Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), a Cuban writer, wrote The Kingdom of This World
(1949), a novel of the magical realism genre, in which elements of fantasy or myth are
included matter-of-factly in seemingly realistic fiction.
 Miguel Angel Asturias (1899–1974), a Guatemalan writer, wrote the novel The
President (1946). This novel along with Carpentier's novel introduced magic realism.

The Boom Novels

These were essentially modernist novels, which appeared in the second half of the 20th century.
They had features that were different or absent from the works of the regionalist writers of the
past. (Regionalist writers were those that used local color, which refers to interesting information
about a particular place or its people.)

The boom novels were the following:

 The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), a Mexican writer
 Hopscotch (1963) by Julio Cortazar (1914–1984), an Argentine fictionist
 The Time of the Hero (1963) by Mario Vargas Llosa , a Peruvian writer
 One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927–2014), a Colombian
fictionist

“Post-Boom” Writers

These writers included a host of women who published works in the last twenty years of the 20th
century. Three of them were Isabel Allende , a Chilean writer who wrote The House of Spirits
(1982); Diamela Eltit , a Chilean writer who wrote E. Luminata (1983); and Luisa
Valenzuela , an Argentine writer who wrote Black Novel with Argentines (1990).

Summary

Latin American Literature refers to all works of literature in Latin American countries. The
20th century saw some of its best writers.