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- A
Condensed History
of Literature
One
of the earliest examples of the beginning of literature
are Epic of Gilgamesh, in its Sumerian version
predating 2000 BC, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead
written down in approximately 250 BC.
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
date to the 8th century BC and mark the beginning of
Classical Antiquity.
A playwright named Aeschylus changed
Western literature forever when he introduced the ideas
of dialogue and interacting characters to playwriting.
Other refiners of playwriting were Sophocles and
Euripides. Sophocles is credited with skillfully
developing irony as a literary technique, most famously
in his play Oedipus the King.
In Latin literature, Ovid's Metamorphoses
creates a form which is a clear predecessor of the
stream of consciousness genre. Satire is one of
the few Roman additions to literature—Horace was the
first to use satire extensively as a tool for argument.
Paul's epistles are the first collection
of personal letters to be treated as literature, the
Gospels arguably present the first realistic biographies
in Western literature, and John's Book of Revelation,
though not the first of its kind, essentially defines
apocalypse as a literary genre.
The Renaissance Period of the 1400s
brought Johann Gutenberg and his invention of the
printing press, an innovation that would change
literature forever. 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 and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales.
William Shakespeare is the most notable
of the early modern playwrights, but numerous others
made important contributions, including Christopher
Marlowe, Molière, and Ben Jonson.
The epic Elizabethan poem The Faerie
Queene by Edmund Spenser published in 1590
marks the transitional period in which
"novelty" begins to enter in to the narrative
in the sense of overturning and playing with the flow of
events.
Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote de
la Mancha published in 1605 has been called
"the first novel" by many literary scholars.
The metaphysical movement of 17th
century English poetry gave rise to such poets as John
Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne,
and Henry Vaughan.
In contrast to the metaphysical poets
was John Milton's Paradise Lost, an epic
religious poem in blank verse.
Early novelists of the seventeenth
century include Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.
The Age of Enlightenment in the early eighteenth
century saw authors such as Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In Britain, the 19th century is
dominated by the Victorian era, characterized by
Romanticism, with Romantic poets such as William
Wordsworth, Lord Byron or Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
genres such as the gothic novel.
Modernism as a literary movement reached
its height in Europe between 1910 and 1920 during which
time gave rise to Gertrude Stein's abstract
writings. Other Modernist literature authors
were Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy,
James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Samuel
Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Robert Frost.
Postmodern literature of post-World War
II unifying features often coincide with Jean-François
Lyotard's concept of the "meta-narrative" and
"little narrative", Jacques Derrida's concept
of "play", and Jean Baudrillard's
"simulacra". A short list of postmodern
authors includes William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John
Barth, E. L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon,
Ishmael Reed, and Kathy Acker.
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"If
you want to be a part of literary history, you
must WRITE! When the weather is bad, the
coffee is cold, the computer is down... you must find
time to write everyday. Talent
needs exercise to grow.
It is not as important what we write as that
we write. You must write to be
read!
Join
the Golden Triangle Writers Guild!
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