GROUP 1- EUROPEAN LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION TO EUROPEAN LITERATURE

European literature is also known as Western literature, is the literature written in the
context of Western culture in the languages of Europe, including the ones belonging to the
Indo-European language family as well as several geographically or historically related
languages such as Basque and Hungarian. Western literature is considered one of the defining
elements of Western civilization.

Also, European literature refers to the literature of Europe. European literature includes
literature in many languages; among the most important of the modern written works are
those in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Italian, Modern Greek, Czech, and
Russian and works by the Scandinavians and Irish.

Important classical and medieval traditions are those in Ancient Greek, Latin, Old Norse,
Medieval French, and the Italian Tuscan dialect of the renaissance.

FAMOUS AUTHORS AND THEIR WORKS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

LES MISERABLES HAMLET FRANKENSTEIN THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Victor Hugo William Shakespeare Mary Wollstonecraft J.R.R Tolkien

Shelley
ARTWORKS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE

The art of Europe, or Western art, encompasses the history of visual art in Europe.
European prehistoric art started as mobile Upper Palaeolithic rock and cave painting and
petroglyph art and was characteristic of the period between the Palaeolithic and the Iron Age.

Written histories of European art often begin with the art of the Ancient Middle East and the
Ancient Aegean civilizations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. Parallel with these significant
cultures, the art of one form or another existed all over Europe, wherever there were people,
leaving signs such as carvings, decorated artifacts, and huge standing stones.

However, a consistent pattern of artistic development within Europe becomes clear only with
the art of Ancient Greece, adopted and transformed by Rome and carried; with the Roman
Empire, across much of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Some examples of
European artworks: Apelles painting Campaspe, an artwork which shows people surrounded
by fine art; by Willem van Haecht; circa 1630 and The Art of Painting; by Johannes Vermeer;
1666-1668.

The influence of the art of the Classical period waxed and waned throughout the next two
thousand years, seeming to slip into a distant memory in parts of the Medieval period, to re-
emerge in the Renaissance, suffer a period of what some early art historians viewed as
"decay" during the Baroque period, to reappear in a refined form in Neo-Classicism and to be
reborn in Post-Modernism.

The Divisions of European Literature

ANCIENT PERIOD

Ancient Period (750 BC- 450)

The birth of European Literature can be traced back to circa 750 BC. Likewise, songs, poems,
fables, anecdotes, and parables were all invented during this period.

Literary Works During Ancient Period:

- First, the Old Testaments of the bible, which composed of 39 books in the Hebrew language.
It is made up of various genres, which include the lyric poem, tales, and Histories.

- Second, the Iliad and Odyssey, which are associated with Homer. The Greek literary
masterpieces were conceived by scholars to have been collected across years by poets using
the oral tradition.
The comparison of the Literary Works is that The Old Testaments was a highly religious and
moralistic while, The Iliad and Odyssey narrated the heroic deeds of Greek characters like
Achilles and Odysseus, who reflected the culture of warfare.

Famous Author:

A. Homer

The Greek poet homer was born sometime between the 12th and
8th centuries BC. He is famous for the epic poems The Illiad and
The Odyssey, which have an enormous effect on western culture.

CLASSICAL PERIOD

Classical Period (450 –1066)

As the beginning of the Current Era (CE) comes, Greece endured its reputation to be a cultural
overpowering force. The Greek drama flourished during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. The
playwright of comedy (like Aristophanes) and tragedy (namely: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides) became popular at this time.

Notable lyrical poets like Pindar and Sappho were also famous. The varied works of the great
philosophers: Plato and Aristotle were also eminent. The Greek tradition was later endured by
the Romans, who resembled their civilization after the Greeks. When the Romans gained their
imperial authority in 27 BC, the emperor Augustus Caesar urged to have a literary identity that
would reflect Rome’s potency.

Approximately a decade after, the poet Virgil became renowned because of his Aeneid, an epic
modelled on Iliad and Odyssey. Rome continued to produce literary giants in drama (Seneca,
Terence, and Plautus), poetry (Horace), and prose (Cicero and Apuleius).
MEDIEVAL PERIOD

Medieval Period (1066–1500)

Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in
Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages (that is, the one thousand years from the fall of the
Western Roman Empire ca. AD 500 to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th, 15th or 16th
century, depending on country).

The literature of this time was composed of religious writings as well as secular works. Just
as in modern literature, it is a complex and rich field of study, from the utterly sacred to the
exuberantly profane, touching all points in-between. Works of literature are often grouped by
place of origin, language, and genre.

THESE ARE THE 10 FAMOUS WORK AND FAMOUS AUTHORS OF MEDIEVAL

AUTHORS: WORKS:
1. Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales
2. Dante Alighieri Divine Comedy
3. Gawain Poet Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
4. Thomas Malory Le Morte d' Arthur
5. William Langland Piers Plowman
6. Giovanni Boccaccio The Decameron
7. Marie de France Lais of Marie de France
8. Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love
9. Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa The Travels of Marco Polo
10. Saint Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica

RENAISSANCE PERIOD

Renaissance Period (1485 –1680)

Renaissance means rebirth. This period has 3 characteristics:

 First, the new interest in education.

 The second one is the new form of Christianity.
 The third one is the journey of the great explorers.

In literature this intended a new intention and investigation given to the work of the great
classical writers. Scholar examined and translated "lost" ancient texts, whose distribution was
much helped by development in printing in Europe from about 1450.
On the other hand, many writes produced literary pieces that created to wealthy patrons who
commissioned their work. In 1440 Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press, which
allowed for mass production of pamphlets and novels. This event gave people more
opportunities to read publication of authors like Petrarch and Boccaccio.

FAMOUS WORK AND FAMOUS AUTHORS OF RENAISSANCE PERIOD

AUTHORS: WORKS:
1. Christopher Marlowe Doctor Faustus
2. Dante Alighieri Divina Commedia
3. Giovanni Boccaccio The Decameron
4. John Milton Paradise Lost
5. Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote
6. Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince
7. Petrarch Canzoniere and Trionfi
8. Sir Thomas More Utopia
9. William Shakespeare King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet

AGE OF REASON

Age of Reason (1650 –1800)

This is also known as the "age of enlightenment" the age of reason aims not to grab a hold on a
useful half-truth but to cause misperception in the overall picture. Because the predominance
of reason had also been a mark of certain periods of the previous era.

literature, the rational desire nurtured satire, argument, wit, plain prose; the other stimulated
the psychological novel and the poetry of the magnificent. Since the print culture emerged
from the previous period, the volume of printed reading materials increased.

Literary works during this period centered on human nature, people-government

relationships, property, natural laws and rights, and organized religion. Thus, this period
caused a dramatic change in the political, economical, and social policies and beliefs of people.
FAMOUS AUTHORS AND THEIR WORKS DURING THIS PERIOD

AUTHORS: WORKS:
1. Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations
2. Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe
3. Denis Diderot Encyclopedia
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract, Emile, and Confessions
5. John Locke An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
6. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travel
7. Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Women
8. Montesquieu A Spirit of the Laws
9. Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
10. Voltaire Candide

ROMANTIC PERIOD

Romantic Period (1798 –1870)

The Romantic period was one of the major social changes in England due to the depopulation
of the countryside and the rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities that took place
roughly between 1798 and 1832.

This period has special interest as the formative era from which many modern literary
conditions and tendencies derived. These literary movements are reflected in the current of
modern literature, and many social and economic characteristics of the 20th century were
determined in the 19th.

FAMOUS AUTHORS AND THEIR WORKS IN ROMANTIC PERIOD

AUTHORS: WORKS:

1. Fredrick Schlegel Lucinde

2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Phenomenology of Mind

3. Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto

4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust

5. Lord Byron Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

6. Mary Shelley Frankenstein

7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Lyrical

Ballads
8. Victor Hugo Les Miserables

9. William Wordsworth The Prelude

MODERNISM PERIOD

Modernism Period (1870 –1965)

Modernism, like realism, provided a critique of the morality of the people belonging to the
middle-class society. Writers during this period explored new forms and styles of writing,
which paved the way to a technique called “stream of consciousness.”

Developed by Marcel Proust, “stream of consciousness” is a style that allowed the author to
explore all of the facets of their thought processes in the absence of any suggested formatting
rules.

POST-MODERNISM PERIOD

Post-Modernism Period (1965 –present)

Characterized by an unusual mix of hig and low culture, this period served as literary and
societal response to the horrifying events of World War ll and elitism of high modernism.
Fragmentation, paradox, and narrator that are difficult to define are common. The style of
writing evokes the absence of tradition in a modern consumer-driven, technologically based
society.

Authors began to use a jumble of various ingredients, known as PASTICHE, which had not been
seen as appropriate for literature before, in order to create a more complex story, filled with
allusion to events and style of other literary works that took certain level of education to
recognize or even begin to appreciate.

FAMOUS AUTHORS AND THEIR WORKS IN POST-MODERNISM PERIOD

1. Alan Moore is an English writer known primarily for his work in comic books including
Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Regarded by some as the best comics writer in the English
language

2. Lanark Life in Four Books, is the first novel of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray. Written over a
period of almost thirty years.
3. Dmitry Galkovsky: The Infinite Deadlock, There’s a huge frustration to hearing about a
supposedly brilliant author and finding that his or her work has not been translated into a
language you speak.

4. Georges Perec’s most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David
Bellos in 1987.

5. Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in the
neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903.

6. Italo Calvino. The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader
trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveller.

7. John Fowles. It was his third published novel, after The Collector (1963) and The Magus
(1965).

8. Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988, and an English translation by William Weaver
appeared a year later.

9. Venedikt Erofeev’s life, like his writing, is often referred to as a riddle. Yet this man, who
lived a life of vagrancy and drunkenness, is now regarded as the underground voice of an
entire nation.

10. Vladimir Sirin was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator and entomologist. Born in
Russia, he wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–38) He achieved international acclaim
and prominence after moving to the United States and beginning to write in English.

11. Walter Abish, published in 1980. Award for Fiction in 1981. It is most often classified as a
postmodern work of fiction.