THE INTERPLAY OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE: AN ESSAY. WERNER T. ANGRESS. State University of New York at Stony Brook. Roughly until the end of .
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Many of the poets and fiction writers mentioned before also wrote…. Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose. The Essay s are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the prose of leisure, the reflectively aphoristic prose piece in imitation of the Essay s of Michel de Montaigne. These brief, descriptive essays depicted the lives of rural folk, or of poor urban dwellers, whose traditional customs differed from the modern ways of those writing them. A uniquely Peruvian version was created by Ricardo Palma, whose sketches are often brief narratives that he called tradiciones.
His recorded sermons are characterized by simplicity…. More About Essay 12 references found in Britannica articles Assorted References major treatment In nonfictional prose: The essay style and themes In literature: The scope of literature contributions of Camus In Albert Camus: Early years Montaigne In Michel de Montaigne: Prose In Chinese literature: Classical literature England In English literature: Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose View More.
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Internet URLs are the best. Thank You for Your Contribution! There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later. Keep Exploring Britannica Buddhism. Buddhism, religion and philosophy that developed from the teachings of the Buddha Sanskrit: Satire is one of the few Roman additions to literature— Horace was the first to use satire extensively as a tool for argument, and Juvenal made it into a weapon. Augustine of Hippo and his The City of God do for religious literature essentially what Plato had done for philosophy, but Augustine's approach was far less conversational and more didactive.
His Confessions is perhaps the first true autobiography , and it gave rise to the genre of confessional literature which is now more popular than ever. Knowledge traditions in India handed down philosophical gleanings and theological concepts through the two traditions of Shruti and Smriti , meaning that which is learnt and that which is experienced - this included the Vedas. It is generally believed that the Puranas are the earliest philosophical writings in Indian history, although linguistic works on Sanskrit existed earlier than BC.
Puranic works such as the Indian epics: Ramayana and Mahabharata , have influenced countless other works, including Balinese Kecak and other performances such as shadow puppetry wayang , and many European works. Pali literature has an important position in the rise of Buddhism. After the fall of Rome in roughly , many of the literary approaches and styles invented by the Greeks and Romans fell out of favor in Europe.
In the millennium or so that intervened between Rome's fall and the Florentine Renaissance , medieval literature focused more and more on faith and faith-related matters, in part because the works written by the Greeks had not been preserved in Europe, and therefore there were few models of classical literature to learn from and move beyond. What little there was became changed and distorted, with new forms beginning to develop from the distortions. Some of these distorted beginnings of new styles can be seen in the literature generally described as Matter of Rome , Matter of France and Matter of Britain.
Following Rome's fall, Islam 's spread across Asia and Africa brought with it a desire to preserve and build upon the work of the Greeks, especially in literature. Although much had been lost to the ravages of time and to catastrophe, as in the burning of the Library of Alexandria , many Greek works remained extant: In Europe Hagiographies , or "lives of the saints ", are frequent among early medieval texts.
The writings of Bede — Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum —and others continue the faith-based historical tradition begun by Eusebius in the early 4th century. Playwriting essentially ceased, except for the mystery plays and the passion plays that focused heavily on conveying Christian belief to the common people.
Around AD the Prudenti Psychomachia began the tradition of allegorical tales.
History of literature - Wikipedia
Poetry flourished, however, in the hands of the troubadours , whose courtly romances and chanson de geste amused and entertained the upper classes who were their patrons. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote works which he claimed were histories of Britain. These were highly fanciful and included stories of Merlin the magician and King Arthur. Epic poetry continued to develop with the addition of the mythologies of Northern Europe: Beowulf and the Norse sagas have much in common with Homer and Virgil's approaches to war and honor, while poems such as Dante 's Divine Comedy and Geoffrey Chaucer 's The Canterbury Tales take much different stylistic directions.
The crusades would affect everything in Europe and the Middle East for many years to come and literature would, along with everything else, be transformed by the wars between these two cultures. For instance the image of the knight would take on a different significance. Also the Islamic emphasis on scientific investigation and the preservation of the Greek philosophical writings would eventually affect European literature. Between Augustine and The Bible , religious authors had numerous aspects of Christianity that needed further explication and interpretation.
Thomas Aquinas , more than any other single person, was able to turn theology into a kind of science, in part because he was heavily influenced by Aristotle, whose works were returning to Europe in the 13th century.
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The epic took form in the 10th century and reached its final form by the 14th century; the number and type of tales have varied from one manuscript to another. This epic has been influential in the West since it was translated in the 18th century, first by Antoine Galland.
The popularity of the work may in part be due to greater popular knowledge of history and geography since it was written. This meant that the plausibility of great marvels had to be set at a greater distance of time "long ago" and place "far away". This is a process that continues, and finally culminates in fantasy fiction having little connection, if any, to actual times and places.
A number of elements from Arabian mythology and Persian mythology are now common in modern fantasy , such as genies , bahamuts , magic carpets , magic lamps, etc. Frank Baum proposed writing a modern fairy tale that banished stereotypical elements he felt the genie, dwarf and fairy were stereotypes to avoid. One example is "The Adventures of Bulukiya", where the protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to explore the seas, journey to the Garden of Eden and to Jahannam , and travel across the cosmos to different worlds much larger than his own world, anticipating elements of galactic science fiction; [9] along the way, he encounters societies of jinns , [10] mermaids , talking serpents , talking trees , and other forms of life.
Other Arabian Nights tales deal with lost ancient technologies, advanced ancient civilizations that went astray, and catastrophes which overwhelmed them. Dante Alighieri 's Divine Comedy , considered the greatest epic of Italian literature , derived many features of and episodes about the hereafter directly or indirectly from Arabic works on Islamic eschatology: These works are said to have been inspired by several Moorish delegations from Morocco to Elizabethan England at the beginning of the 17th century.
Ibn Tufail Abubacer and Ibn al-Nafis were pioneers of the philosophical novel. Both of these narratives had protagonists Hayy in Philosophus Autodidactus and Kamil in Theologus Autodidactus who were autodidactic feral children living in seclusion on a desert island , both being the earliest examples of a desert island story. However, while Hayy lives alone with animals on the desert island for the rest of the story in Philosophus Autodidactus , the story of Kamil extends beyond the desert island setting in Theologus Autodidactus , developing into the earliest known coming of age plot and eventually becoming the first example of a science fiction novel.
Theologus Autodidactus deals with various science fiction elements such as spontaneous generation , futurology , the end of the world and doomsday , resurrection , and the afterlife. Rather than giving supernatural or mythological explanations for these events, Ibn al-Nafis attempted to explain these plot elements using the scientific knowledge of biology , astronomy , cosmology and geology known in his time. His main purpose behind this science fiction work was to explain Islamic religious teachings in terms of science and philosophy through the use of fiction. These translations later inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe , a candidate for the title of " first novel in English ".
Among other innovations in Arabic literature was Ibn Khaldun 's perspective on chronicling past events—by fully rejecting supernatural explanations, Khaldun essentially invented the scientific or sociological approach to history. Ferdowsi 's Shahnameh , the national epic of Iran , is a mythical and heroic retelling of Persian history.
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It is the longest epic poem ever written. From Persian culture the book which would, eventually, become the most famous in the west is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Amir Arsalan was also a popular mythical Persian story, which has influenced some modern works of fantasy fiction, such as The Heroic Legend of Arslan. Examples of early Persian proto- science fiction include Al-Farabi 's Opinions of the residents of a splendid city about a utopian society, Al-Qazwini 's futuristic tale of Awaj bin Anfaq about a man who travelled to Earth from a distant planet, and elements such as the flying carpet.
The two primary streams of Ottoman written literature are poetry and prose. Of the two, divan poetry was by far the dominant stream. Moreover, it should be noted that, until the 19th century, Ottoman prose did not contain any examples of fiction ; that is, there were no counterparts to, for instance, the European romance , short story , or novel though analogous genres did, to some extent, exist in both the Turkish folk tradition and in divan poetry.
Until the 19th century, Ottoman prose never managed to develop to the extent that contemporary divan poetry did. Medieval Jewish fiction often drew on ancient Jewish legends , and was written in a variety of languages including Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. Liturgical Jewish poetry in Hebrew flourished in Palestine in the seventh and eighth centuries with the writings of Yose ben Yose , Yanai , and Eleazar Kalir [31] Later Jewish poets in Spain, Provencal, and Italy wrote both religious and secular poems in Hebrew; particularly prominent poets were the Spanish Jewish poets Solomon ibn Gabirol and Yehuda Halevi.
In addition to poetry and fiction, medieval Jewish literature also includes philosophical literature , mystical Kabbalistic literature , ethical musar literature , legal halakhic literature, and commentaries on the Bible. Early Medieval Gupta period literature in India sees the flowering of Sanskrit drama , classical Sanskrit poetry and the compilation of the Puranas.
Sanskrit declines in the early 2nd millennium, late works such as the Kathasaritsagara dating to the 11th century, to the benefit of literature composed in Middle Indic vernaculars such as Old Bengali , Old Hindi.
History of literature
Lyric poetry advanced far more in China than in Europe prior to , as multiple new forms developed in the Han , Tang , and Song dynasties: Printing began in Tang Dynasty China. A copy of the Diamond Sutra , a key Buddhist text, found sealed in a cave in China in the early 20th century, is the oldest known dated printed book, with a printed date of The method used was block printing.
The scientist, statesman, and general Shen Kuo AD was the author of the Dream Pool Essays , a large book of scientific literature that included the oldest description of the magnetized compass. During the Song Dynasty, there was also the enormous historical work of the Zizhi Tongjian , compiled into volumes of 3 million written Chinese characters by the year AD. Classical Japanese literature generally refers to literature produced during the Heian Period , what some would consider a golden era of art and literature. The Tale of Genji early 11th century by Murasaki Shikibu is considered the pre-eminent masterpiece of Heian fiction and an early example of a work of fiction in the form of a novel.
It is sometimes called the world's first novel, the first modern novel, the first romance novel , or the first novel to still be considered a classic. The iroha poem, now one of two standard orderings for the Japanese syllabary , was also written during the early part of this period. The 10th-century Japanese narrative, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter , can be considered an early example of proto- science fiction.
The protagonist of the story, Kaguya- hime , is a princess from the Moon who is sent to Earth for safety during a celestial war, and is found and raised by a bamboo cutter in Japan. She is later taken back to the Moon by her real extraterrestrial family. A manuscript illustration depicts a disc-shaped flying object similar to a flying saucer. In this time the imperial court patronized the poets, most of whom were courtiers or ladies-in-waiting.
Editing anthologies of poetry was a national pastime. Reflecting the aristocratic atmosphere, the poetry was elegant and sophisticated and expressed emotions in a rhetorical style. Had nothing occurred to change literature in the 15th century but the Renaissance, the break with medieval approaches would have been clear enough. The 15th century, however, also brought Johann Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press , an innovation for Europe, at least that would change literature forever. Texts were no longer precious and expensive to produce—they could be cheaply and rapidly put into the marketplace.
Literacy went from the prized possession of the select few to a much broader section of the population though by no means universal. As a result, much about literature in Europe was radically altered in the two centuries following Gutenberg's unveiling of the printing press in William Caxton was the first English printer and published English language texts including Le Morte d'Arthur a collection of oral tales of the Arthurian Knights which is a forerunner of the novel and Geoffrey Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales.
These are an indication of future directions in literature. With the arrival of the printing press a process begins in which folk yarns and legends are collected within a frame story and then mass published. In the Renaissance, the focus on learning for learning's sake causes an outpouring of literature.
Perhaps the most controversial and important work of the time period was a treatise printed in Nuremberg , entitled De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium: A new spirit of science and investigation in Europe was part of a general upheaval in human understanding which began with the European invasion of the New World in and continues through the subsequent centuries, even up to the present day.
The form of writing now commonplace across the world—the novel —originated from the early modern period and grew in popularity in the next century. Before the modern novel became established as a form there first had to be a transitional stage when "novelty" began to appear in the style of the epic poem. Plays for entertainment as opposed to religious enlightenment returned to Europe's stages in the early modern period.
From the 16th to the 18th century Commedia dell'arte performers improvised in the streets of Italy and France. Some Commedia dell'arte plays were written down. Shakespeare drew upon the arts of jesters and strolling players in creating new style comedies. All the parts, even the female ones, were played by men en travesti but that would change, first in France and then in England too, by the end of the 17th century. The epic Elizabethan poem The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser was published, in its first part, in and then in completed form in The Fairie Queen marks the transitional period in which "novelty" begins to enter into the narrative in the sense of overturning and playing with the flow of events.
Theatrical forms known in Spenser's time such as the Masque and the Mummers' Play are incorporated into the poem in ways which twist tradition and turn it to political propaganda in the service of Queen Elizabeth I. The earliest work considered an opera in the sense the work is usually understood dates from around It is Dafne , now lost written by Jacopo Peri for an elite circle of literate Florentine humanists who gathered as the " Camerata ". The most famous authors beside playwrights include Jean de La Fontaine and Charles Perrault known primarily for their fables.
Miguel de Cervantes 's Don Quixote has been called "the first novel" by many literary scholars or the first of the modern European novels. It was published in two parts. The first part was published in and the second in It might be viewed as a parody of Le Morte d'Arthur and other examples of the chivalric romance , in which case the novel form would be the direct result of poking fun at a collection of heroic folk legends.
This is fully in keeping with the spirit of the age of enlightenment which began from about this time and delighted in giving a satirical twist to the stories and ideas of the past. It's worth noting that this trend toward satirising previous writings was only made possible by the printing press. Without the invention of mass-produced copies of a book it would not be possible to assume the reader will have seen the earlier work and will thus understand the references within the text.