European Literature

Dr. Lal C. A.

A common heritage
European literatures, like European languages, are parts of a common heritage Greek, Italian, German, Russian, Spanish and French are all members of the Indo-European family. Originating in the days of classical Greek and Rome, this heritage was preserved, transformed, and spread by Christianity

Greek and Latin

Greek literature was influenced by the religious myths of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Egypt. Roman writers looked to Greek precept for themes, treatment, and choice of verse and metre. All of the chief kinds of literature in Europe - epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric, satire, history, biography, and prose narrative - were established by the Greeks.

Greek and Latin

Homers epic was the model for Virgil; the lyric fragments of Alcaeus and Sappho for Catullus and Ovid; the history of Thucydides for Livy and Tacitus. The tragedy of the great Athenians of the 5th century BC provided models for Seneca but his plays were far inferior in quality.

Greek and Latin

The philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle too did not have worthy counterparts in ancient Roman. Romans were practical and not philosophers. While Greek writers excelled in abstraction, the Romans had an unusually concrete vision and, as their art of portraiture shows, were intensely interested in human individuality.

Greek and Latin

Rome eventually passed the torch on to the early Middle Ages, by which time Greek had been subsumed under a wholly Latin tradition. Rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature during Renaissance The classical tradition became a threat to natural literary development, particularly when certain critics of the 17th century began to insist that the subjects and style of contemporary writing should conform with those employed by Greece and Rome.

Medieval literature
AD 300 to 15 Century Approx

The human ideal held up in Greek and Latin literature, was tempered by the spiritual ideal of Judeo-Christianity, during the transition to medieval literature. The fusion of Christian and Classical philosophy framed the Mediaeval sensibility.

Monasteries became centres of scholarship. They preserved the only classical literature available in the West during the raids of Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Norsemen.

Medieval literature : Latin

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Latin continued to predominate over the vernacular and major works in the fields of philosophy, theology, history, and science were all written in Latin. 1. St. Augustine's City of God, Confessions. 2. Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical 3. The Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus.

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History

Medieval literature: Vernacular

Works in the vernacular belonged to the oral tradition and were later written down by Christian scribes. Eg. The Poetic Edda (AD 800 1100) and the sagas of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the German Song of Hildebrand, all belonging to a common Germanic alliterative tradition.

Vernacular Romances & Courtly Love Lyrics

In the romance, complex themes of love, loyalty, and personal integrity were united with a quest for spiritual truth. Eg. The Song of Roland [La Chanson de Roland c.1100]. The idealized lady and languishing suitor of the courtly poets of became stereotypes in Western poetry.

Medieval drama

Began in the religious ceremonies that took place in church on important dates in the Christian calendar. Three types the mystery, the miracle, and the morality One of the best known morality plays was translated from Dutch to be known in English as Everyman.

Medieval Masters
Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio came late in the period and their works reveal the best of medieval literature, and simultaneously announced the great themes and forms of Renaissance literature

The Renaissance
Marked by three principal characteristics: 1. The awakening of a new spirit of intellectual and artistic inquiry. 2. The Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther 3. The voyages of the great explorers that culminated in the discovery of America

Renaissance Humanism

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
(Hamlet Act II, Scene II)

Masters of the Renaissance

French: the poetry of the poets making up the group known as La Pliade and in the reflective essays of Michel de Montaigne. Spanish: Miguel de Cervantes Dutch: Desiderius Erasmus English: Marlowe, Webster, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare

Seventeenth Century
Challenging the accepted

England: Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), Milton, Dryden. France: Descartes's Discourse on Method (1637) and Pascal's Penses [Thoughts] (written 165758) Molire, Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine

Eighteenth Century
Age of Reason

Age of Reason: reflected by the pursuit of order, symmetry, decorum, and scientific knowledge. Age of sensibility: reflected by philanthropy, exaltation of personal relationships, religious fervour, and the cult of sentiment, or sensibility.

England in the 18th Century

The cult of wit, satire, and argument: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson Emergence of the Novel: Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, and Tobias Smollett.

France in the 18th Century

Philosophical and political writings of the Enlightenment :- profound influence throughout the rest of Europe and foreshadowed the French Revolution. Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand (1768-1848),
Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb [1849-50]
[considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.]

Voltaire Rousseau Montesquieu Diderot

German in the 18th Century

Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress)
German literary movement of the late 18th century that exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and sought to overthrow the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Friedrich Schiller

Nineteenth Century
Romanticism Realism Naturalism Impressionism Symbolist movement

19th C French Literature: Fiction

Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885): poet, novelist,

and playwright, Romantic.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) Les Misrables (1862)

Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), Romantic

Historical Novelist and Playwright. The Three Musketeers (1844) The Count of Monte-Cristo (1844).

19th C French Literature: Fiction

Honor de Balzac (1799 1850) French Realist

His sequence of about 90 novels collectively titled

The Human Comedy. e.g., La Cousine Bette (1846)

Stendhal (1783 -1842), great master of the

French analytical novel. e.g., The Red and the Black (1830).

George Sand (1804 - 1876), Indiana

(1832).Significant woman writer.

19th C French Literature: Fiction

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) French Realist. Noted for objective approach and painstaking perfection of style. Madame Bovary [1857] mile Zola (1840-1902) Founder of the Naturalist movement. Nana (1880), The Human Beast, (1890) Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), Naturalist

19th C French Literature: Poetry

Reaction against Romanticism [II half of the C] Thophile Gautier (1811- 1872) advocated art for art's sake- a belief that art need serve no extrinsic purpose

Parnassianism: movement led by Leconte de Lisle, who stressed restraint, objectivity, technical perfection, and precise description as a reaction against the emotionalism and verbal imprecision of the Romantics.

19th C French Literature

THE DECADENTS Joris-Karl Huysmans rebours (1884) Charles Baudelaire (1821 1867) Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue Stphane Mallarm. THE SYMBOLISTS Arthur Rimbaud, Stphane Mallarm, Jules Laforgue

19th C German Literature

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Sorrows of Young Werther [1779] Faust I [1805] Faust II [1832] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) The Will to Power (1901)

19th C Russian Literature

The19thcenturyisthe period of Russian literature most familiar to readers. Golden Age of Poetry: Aleksandr Pushkin. Novels: Nikolay Gogol(Dead Souls) Ivan Turgenev (Fathers and Sons)

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), was a social and political thinker and an enormous moral force.
War and Peace Anna Karenina T he Death of Ivan Ilyich Resurrection

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)

Notes from Underground

Crime and Punishment

The Idiot

Devils, Demons or The Possessed

The Brothers Karamazov

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Uncle Vanya The Seagull

Three Sisters

The Cherry Orchard

Twentieth Century
Darwin Marx Freud Jacques Derrida Claude Lvi-Strauss

Russian Literature
Gorky: Humble beginnings, tradition of Tolstoy and Checkov, inspired by revolutionary movements of the time. He is best known in the West for his early short stories, his three-volume autobiography, his play of the socially disinherited, The Lower Depths (1903). Soviet commentators emphasize his political contributions to literature, including the revolutionary novel Mother (1907) and they celebrate him as a founder of the movement known as Socialist Realism.

Socialist Realism
Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984) And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) Virgin Soil Upturned (1931) Brodsky, Joseph (1940-1996), Russian-born American poet. Nobel Prize 1987. Vladimir Nabokov, (1899-1977), RussianAmerican novelist, poet, and critic. Lolita (1955)

French Literature: Poetry

Guillaume Apollinaire, (1880-1918) is credited with the first use of the term Surrealist, two volumes of poetry, Alcools (1913), The Cubist Painters (1913). Paul Valry, (1871-1945):early poems, collected in Album of Ancient Verse, 1921, were influenced by the Symbolists. Later prose works consist of philosophical studies and meditations. Andr Breton, (1896-1966), French poet and critic, a leader of the Surrealist Movement.

French Drama
Early 20th-century theatre is as much the creation of actor-directors as of dramatists. Jean, Anouilh, (1910-1987), Jean, Giraudoux, (1882-1944), Albert Camus, (1913-1960), In Caligula (1945) and State of Siege, (1948), Camus explores the absurdity of the human predicament. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-1980), In The Flies, ( 1947), No Exit, (1946), and Dirty Hands, ( 1948) he variously tackles the problems of identity, freedom, responsibility, and political commitment, without losing sight of the drama.

French Drama
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), conceived the Theatre of Cruelty, designed to shock the spectator into a recognition of humankinds primitive ferocity. Inspired Genet Jean Genet, (1910-1986), French novelist and dramatist, whose writings, dwelling upon bizarre and grotesque aspects of human existence, express profound rebellion against society and its conventions. The Maids, (1955) and The Balcony (1957). Eugne Ionesco, (1912-1994), the chief exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd. The Bald Prima Donna (1950); Rhinocros (1960)

French Fiction
Novel a very popular genre by early twentieth century. There were a large number of romanscycles (series of novels, tracing a character, family, or society through a particular period) published during this time. Romain Rolland (1866-1944), for instance. Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past (1922-1932) in seven related books this cyclic novel is regarded as one of the greatest achievements in world literature.

French Fiction
Andr Gide (1869-1951), The Immoralist (1902), influenced by Proust. Georges Bernanos; Diary of a Country Priest, 1936. psychological analysis or spiritual conflict. Sartres Nausea (1938) existentialist predicament. Camuss; The Outsider, (1942) and Essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Fall (1957), The Plague (1947).

French Fiction
Simone de Beauvoir. Pretty Pictures, (1966); The Woman Destroyed, (1967); feminist concerns. Claude Simon (1913- ), 1985 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects in disrupted chronology and complex, multi-layered narrative, as in The Georgics, (1981), in which he also uses intertextuality.

German Theatre
Bertolt Brecht, (1898-1956) German dramatist, director, and poet, experimental treatment of social themes and revolutionary experiments greatly influenced modern drama and theatrical production. He began as an Expressionist but soon developed his own style - epic theatre. Early plays offered communist solutions. His later, plays, however, among them Mother Courage and Her Children, (1941), The Caucasian Chalk Circle, (1944-1945), and The Good Woman of Setzuan, (1943) are more ambiguous, seeking to educate the audience about social injustice but less ready to offer glib remedies.

German Fiction
Thomas Mann, (1875-1955), Buddenbrooks (1901;
trans. 1904), begins the theme of conflict between the smug, prosperous representatives of healthy bourgeois life and the perceptive, often sickly artist. In The Magic Mountain (1924) he offered what is in effect an allegory of Western intellectual life on the eve of World War I. Death in Venice (1925). His despair over the fate of Germany and his concern with the creative artist are eloquently portrayed in Doctor Faustus (1947). The Black Swan.

German Fiction
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), a sense of spiritual
loneliness, often tempered by the wisdom and the mysticism of Oriental philosophy. Demian (1919) Siddhartha (1922).

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Austrian (Czech) Jewish;

disturbing, symbolic fiction, prefigured the oppression and despair of the late 20th century. He is considered one of the most significant figures in modern world literature; the term Kafkaesque has, in fact, come to be applied commonly to grotesque, anxiety-producing social conditions or their treatment in literature. The Trial (1925; ), The Castle (1926), and America (1927).

German Fiction
Gnter Grass, (1927- ), The Tin Drum (1959), filmed
in 1979, created a storm with its impious vulgarities, portraying Nazi Germany and the post-war era from the bizarre perspective of an eternal three-year old. His fiction is an unconventional blend of realism, the macabre, fantasy, and symbolism, informed also by the theme of collective guilt. It usually depicts the struggle of a man, himself often grotesque in form or in his perceptions, to maintain his individuality in what Grass conceives as the materialistic nightmare of contemporary life.

Italian Literature
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), introduced into

his plays original dramatic devices that tended to bring actors and the audience into closer relation and most of them treat philosophical problems, such as relativism and multiple personality, with subtle psychological insight illuminated by graceful wit. The most famous of Pirandello's plays include the following: Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Henry IV (1922).

Greek Fiction

Nikos Kazantzakis (1885-1957), His bestknown poem is The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938), a long epic beginning where Homer's Odyssey ends. Among his most popular novels, available in English, are Zorba the Greek (1943), later made into a film and a musical, and The Greek Passion (1948).
Dr. Lal C. A.