History of literature

1. JOHN MIGUEL F. MORALES
BSE-ENGLISH

2. THE EARLIEST LITERATURE
• 5500 years ago- Ancient Sumerians
• 3000’s BC- Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Hebrews
• Old Testament- Outstanding work of literature
• Chinese, Indians, and Persians-
• Created many significant works of literature
• influenced Western Literature

3. ANCIENT LITERATURE
• 900-300 BC- Civilization developed in Ancient
Greece
• Epic Age
• Homer- 700BC, Iliad & Odyssey
• Lyric Age(800-475 BC)
• Sappho- love
• Pindar- songs of praise
• Attic Age (475-300 BC)
• Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides
• Comedies of Aristophanes
• Herodotus
• Father of History
• wrote about Persian war
• Plato and Aristotle
• Most important Greek writers
• Influenced Western Civilization

4. ANCIENT LITERATURE
• Alexandrian Age (300-146 BC)
• Theocritus
• Pastoral Poetry
• Greco-Roman Age (146 BC – 529 AD)
• Lives of Plutarch and Greek
Anthologies
• Titus Maccius Plautus and Terenc
• Writers of Latin comedies
• Vigil
• Greatest Roman Poet
• The Aeneid
• Ovid
• Metamorphoses
• 250 stories
• Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Philippics
• Attacking Mark Antony
• Julius Caesar
• Commentaries on the Gallic War

5. THE MIDDLE AGES
• 400’s – 1400’s
• Rome fell to the Goths- 400’s
• Greek and Roman poems and plays were forgotten
• Epic Poetry were brought
• Beowulf (700)
• Anglo-Saxon epic
• The Song of Roland (1100)
• French song
• Nibelungenlied / Song of the Nibelungs (1200)
• Scandinavian Sagas (1200’s)
• Narrative stones of adventure, fantasy and love
• 900’s – 1200’s
• The Celtic tales of King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table
• Great Britain
• Lyric Poetry (1100’s – 1200’s)
• Troubadours and Trouveres (France) and
Minnesingers (Germany)
• Love Songs
• Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy
• First serious literary work written in European
Language
• Geoffrey Chaucer (1300’s)
• Father of English Poetry
• Canterbury Tales
• Fix the form of English Language

6. THE RENAISSANCE
• Italy (1300)
• Europe (1400’s-1500’s)
• Petrarch
• Sonnet
• Giovanni Boccaccio
• Decameron
• Collection of hundred short stories
• Essays of Michael de Montaigne (France)
• Rollicking Tales of Francois Rabelais (France)
• England (1500’s)
• Francis Bacon
• Christopher Marlowe
• Blank Verse
• The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
• Ben Jonson
• William Shakespeare
• Spanish Literature
• Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• Spain’s best-known writer
• Don Quixote (1600’s)
• Worlds Greatest Novel

7. THE AGE OF REASON
• Greek and Roman classics gained new importance (1600’s-1700’s)
• Neoclassicist
• Rejected the authority of religious traditions
• Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton
• Civil war in England (1642)
• Cavaliers
• Defending the King
• Puritans
• Defended the Parliament
• French Classics (1600’s)
• Tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Baptiste Racine and Comedies of Moliere Voltaire

8. ROMANTICISM
• Europe (1700’s-1800’s)
• Jean Jacques (France)
• Represented the spirit of rebellion against the neoclassic world

9. REALISM
• Stendhal, Honore de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert of France
• Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy of Russia
• Charles Dickens
• Realism was mixed with romanticism
• Emile Zola of France
• led the naturalist movement in literature
• Walt Whitman
• Combined realism and romanticism

10. THE 1900'S
• Writers increasingly experimented with form and technique in novels, stories,
plays, and poems
• Literature often expressed the optimism and conservative ideals
• Authors of the 1920s wrote about disillusioned and rootless characters
• Lost Generation
• Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald of the United States
• The Great Depression of the 1930s led to literature that protested against
what the authors considered unjust social conditions
• Latin-American and Japanese authors first gained international acclaim