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The History of World Literature
The History of World Literature
The History of World Literature
Literature
1000 BC - Present
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
• 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
British Literature
• Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
• Mary Shelley Frankenstein
American Literature
• Washington Irving Rip Van Winkle
• James Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans
• 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