Chapter 7: Characteristics of World Literature

Question 1

Genres of World Literature

Answer 1

Folklore
Fiction
Poetry
Nonfiction

Question 2

Folklore

Answer 2

FABLES
In prose or verse to point to a moral
Characters are frequently animals
Ex:
Aesop (Greek)
La Fontaine (French)
Krylov (Russian)

LEGENDS
Fictional stories once believe to have been true and handed down as historical tradition.
An exaggeration of individuals and improbably events.
Ex:
Faust, King Arthur, Robin Hood

MYTHOLOGY
An anonymous work having roots in primitive folk belief.
Present supernatural episodes to interpret natural events.
Ex:
Every country has its own mythology; best known are Greek, Roman, and Norse.

Question 3

Fiction

Answer 3

FANTASY
-A conscious breaking free from reality. It may be employed merely for the whimsical delight of an an author, or a serious comment on reality.
EX:
The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
Harry Potter (Rawling)

SCIENCE FICTION
-A form of fantasy in which scientific facts, assumptions, or hypotheses form the basis of adventures in the future, other dimensions or under new variants of scientific law.
EX:
Isaac Asimov
Robert Heinlein
Arthur C. Clarke

UTOPIAN FICTION
-Describes an imaginary ideal world.
EX:
Utopia (Sir Thomas More) - describing a perfect political state.

DYSTOPIAN FICTION
-Seeks to point out what is wrong with a seemingly perfect situation or condition; offers alternative or negative view.
EX:
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury)
We (Eugene Zamiatin)

Question 4

Poetry

Answer 4

BEAT POETRY
-American poets in 1950s and 60s in romantic rebellion against the culture and value system of the United States.
EX:
Allen Ginsberg
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

CONFESSIONAL
-Focuses on poet's private experiences and personal feelings
EX:
Sylvia Plath
Anne Sexton
Robert Lowell
John Berryman

METAPHYSICAL
-Philosophical poetry, 17th century
EX:
John Donne

PASTORAL
-Poem dealing with rustic life
EX:
Virgil

LYRICAL
-Showing personal feelings of a first person speaker.
Descended from poems sung with a lyre.
EX:
Dice Thrown (Stefane Mallarme)
Bright Stat (John Keats)

Japan 
The Manyoshu (an anthology of more than 4,500 poems)

Question 5

Nonfiction

Answer 5

BIOGRAPHY
-Written stories about someone’s real life and events that happened in it..
EX:
Are typically written about political leaders, musicians, scientists, artists, sports figures, etc.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
-Person’s life as written by that person.
First person, “free expression” of presenting unabashed self.
EX:
Vita (Benvenuto Cellini)
The Confessions (St. Augustine)
Autobiography: The story of My Experiences with Truth (Ghandi)
Mark Twain’s Autobiography published in 2010 - 100 years after his death

ESSAY
-A prose composition that explicates a topic
EX:
Essays (Michel de Montaigne)

Question 6

Homer

Answer 6

Iliad and Odyssey
A source of history and religion for the Greeks, the Iliad describes a story of the siege of Troy; the Odyssey a tale of Ulysses’s wanderings. The Iliad, especially, is a literature standard. As a favorite among early Greek dramatists, it is considered to be one of the most influential works of the Western canon.

Question 7

Chaucer

Answer 7

Born between 1340 and 1344 and author of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer made a crucial contributuion to English literature by using English at a time when court poetry was still mostly written in Anglo-Norman or Latin. The Canterbury Tales ranks as one of the greatest epic works of world literature.

Question 8

Shakespeare

Answer 8

Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare was perhaps the finest lyric poet of his day exemplified by songs scattered through his plays. A master dramatist of the English language, Shakespeare changed literature for all time with his poignant tragedies, tragicomedies, and histories. As master of the pen, Shakespeare finessed the use of a variety of literary elements; in Medis Res, puns, dramatic irony, foreshadowing, soliloquies, and anachronisms.

Question 9

William Wordsworth

Answer 9

William Wordsworth was born and raised in the Lake District of England. Together with Samuel Tayler Coleridge, Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, the first great work of the English Romantic movement. Wordsworth changed poetry forever by the decision to use common language in his poetry instead of artificial poetic diction.

Question 10

Elizabeth Barret Browning

Answer 10

Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her first book of poetry when she was thirteen. She soon became the most famous female poet in English history. At 39, she eloped with Robert Browning and wrote her most famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sequence of forty-four sonnets recording the growth of her love for Robert.

Question 11

Charles Dickens

Answer 11

As a master characterization, Charles Dickens, reveled in the variety and peculiarity of the human character, His later novels show great psychological depth, offering his distinct brand of social criticism, as in Hard Times.

Question 12

Hawthorne

Answer 12

Nathanial Hawthorne was a leader in the development of the short story as a distinctive American genre. The philosophic attitude implicit in his writing is generally pessimistic. His emphasis on allegory and symbolism causes his characters to be more often recalled as the embodiment of psychological traits or moral concepts than as living figures.

Question 13

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Answer 13

Centered in a new religious movement called Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy was rooted in an American Romanticist and Puritan background. Through his writings, he preached doctrine of higher individualism, the spiritual nature of reality, the importance of self-reliance, and the existence of a unifying Over-Soul.

Question 14

Emily Dickinson

Answer 14

Emily Dickinson called her 1000 brief lyrics her “letter to the world.” Dickinson was candid in her insights into her own state of consciousness and her speculations of the timeless mysteries of love and death. Her mind was charged with paradox as her eye was focused in opposite directions of two worlds; earthly and heavenly concerns.

Question 15

Twain

Answer 15

An American Realist, Mark Twain wrote in the 19th century when American social and political issues included industrialization, slavery, and regionalism. Twain, an American writer, journalist, and humorist, won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Sensitive to the sound of language, Twain introduced colloquial speech into American fiction.

Question 16

Langston Hughes

Answer 16

Langston Hughes was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Langston began his prolific literary career with poems on black themes, in jazz rhythms, and with idiomatic phrases. His concern with his race, mainly in an urban setting, is evident in his work as is his social conscience.

Question 17

Virginia Wolfe

Answer 17

Virginia Woolf revolutionized modern fiction as one of the pioneers of the stream-of-consciousness writing technique. This literary device allowed readers to look directly into the flow of thoughts and images in a character’s mind. In her more revolutionary works To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, Wolfe virtually abolishes “plot” to concentrate on what she called “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.”

Question 18

Poe

Answer 18

Edgar Alan Poe was a short story master of Gothic literature. He is famous for his horror tales and is credited with inventing the detective story, as well as for writing poetry with a prominent use of rhythms, alliteration and assonance that gives it a strong musical quality.

Question 19

Hemingway

Answer 19

Ernest Hemingway was a leading spokesman for the “Lost Generation”: he expressed the feelings of a war-wounded people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope. His stories are mainly concerned with “tough” people, intelligent men and women who have dropped into exhausted cynicism. When reading his work, readers will note that emotion is held at arm’s length; on the bare happenings are recorded and emphasis is obtained by understatement and spare dialogue.

Question 20

William Faulkner

Answer 20

William Faulkner’s success as a novelist came fwhen he began writing about the northern Mississippi area he knew best. William Faulkner created a world in the loosely constructed Yoknapatawpha saga. His discovery that this “little postage stamp of native soil” was worth writing about enabled him to write a series of acclaimed experimental novels. His themes show the decline of the Old South and the rise of unscrupulous families. Winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize for literature Faulkner wrote, “…man will not merely endure; he will prevail…because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance” and the “writer’s duty is to write about these things.”

Question 21

Zora Neale Hurston

Answer 21

Zora Neale Hurston, folklorist and anthropoligist, gathered examples of dialects of the south before they would die out. She collected folk stories and songs and included them in her works such as Jonah’s Gourd Vine and her classic Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her conscious effort was to preserve the language and culture that was rapidly disappearing.

Question 22

Toni Morrison

Answer 22

Toni Morrison is an American author who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In her work she has explored the experience and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society. In the center of her complex and multilayered narratives is the unique cultural inheritance of African-Americans.

Question 23

Henrik Ibsen

Answer 23

Henrik Ibsen was born in Skien - a tiny coastal town in southeast Norway. Ibsen grew up in poverty. Familiar with the economic hardships he later depicted in his plays, he experimented with realistic plays exploring social issues related to middle-class life.

Question 24

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Answer 24

Often considered father of magical realism, his most famous work, the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967. Marquez’s fiction is characterized by magical realism, which, as he put it “expands the categories of the real so as to encompass myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena in Nature or experience” excluded by European realistic fiction.

Question 25

Major Movements and Periods in Literature (List)

Answer 25

• Ancient and Classic
• Medieval
• Renaissance
• Neoclassicism
• Romanticism
• Transcendentalism
• Realism
• Naturalism
• Surrealism
• Modernism

Question 26

Ancient and Classic

Answer 26

Ancient and classical literature included epics, lyric poetry, dramatic plays, comedies and tragedies and the origin of the novel.

Literature from the ancient and classical past provides an element of stability, a standard of permanence. Proponents of the Ancients believed that they giants of Greece and Rome had not only established standards applicable to all subsequent accomplishments but provided models never to be excelled.

EX:
Epic of Gilgamesh, The Code of Hammurab, Homer’s the Iliad and Odyssey, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, Plato’s Apology, the writings of Aristotle, Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Rex, the works of Virgil, and Shanameh’s The Persian Book of Kings, and the earliest Chinese - the Book of Songs (a collection of 305 poems dating from 1000 to 600 B.C.)

Question 27

Medieval

Answer 27

-In the West, strong Christian influence prompted the exploration of Biblical themes and stories and contributing to the development of hymns, mystery plays, and religious poetry.

Numerous religious works were written by saints and clerics.

Secular literary genres included topics such as courtly love, fantastic accounts of travel to far away lands, goliard poetry (satirical Latin poetry written by clerics), and political poetry with social satire.

In the East, religious texts included historical narratives describing creation and destruction, and genealogies of kings, heroes, demigods. Clerics were also writing poems, stories, dramas, and puranas.

EX:
Wyclif’s Bible

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or La Morte d’Arthur; The Song of Roland

Dante’s the Divine Comedy

In Japan, the rise of song lyrics sung at parties and by courtesans.

Rise of drama and professional storytelling in vernacular Chinese; in Hang-chou, the capital of the Southern Sung.

Question 28

Renaissance

Answer 28

The Renaissance prompted renewed interest in classical antiquity; a rise in humanist philosophy including a belief in self, human wroth, and individual dignity. Radical changes in ideas about science, religion, and politics were reflected in literacy topics - dramatic plays, poetry, and lyrical epics.

EX:
Milton, Paradise Lost

The plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.

Cervantes, Don Quixote

In Japan, the rise of linked poetry, composed by several poets, Murmured Conversations (Shinkei)

Question 29

Neoclassicism

Answer 29

Refers to the attitudes toward life and art that dominated literature during the 18th century. Neoclassicists respected order, reason, and rules. They also viewed humans as limited and imperfect.

They valued intellect and considered it more important than emotions noting that society was more important than the individual. The neoclassicists admired classical literature.

EX:
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Question 30

Romanticism

Answer 30

Romanticism refers to the literary period that dominated during the 19th century. Romantic writers looked to nature for their inspiration. They idealized the past and celebrated the individual. In reaction to neoclassicism, their treatment of subjects was emotional rather than rational. They celebrated imagination.

EX:
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Edgar Allen Poe, short stories

Question 31

Transcendentalism

Answer 31

Emerging from New England in the mid 19th century, transcendentalism is rooted in post-Kantian idealism philosophy and began as a protest against the culture and society.

Transcendentalists believed that an ideal spiritual state that transcends the physical and empirical is realized only through the individual’s intuition rather than through established religions.

EX:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Question 32

Realism

Answer 32

Realism also emerged during the 19th century. Realism authors based their writing on careful observations of ordinary life. They often focused on the middle and lower classes of society and attempted to present life objectively and honestly without idealism and sentimentality.

EX:
James Joyce, “Araby”

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Question 33

Naturalism

Answer 33

Naturalism is characterized as an extreme form of realism. Naturalism in fiction involves the depiction of life objectively and precisely, without idealizing. The naturalist creates characters who are victims of environmental forces and internal drives that are beyond their comprehension and control.

EX:
Frank Norris, McTeague

Jack London, “To Build a Fire”

Question 34

Surrealism

Answer 34

A movement that began in the 1920s. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions, and non sequitur. Surrealist writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement.

EX:
Rene Creval’s Mr. Knife Miss Fork

Andre Breton’s On the Road to San Romano

Question 35

Modernism

Answer 35

Modernism emerged shortly after World War 1> Modernism is marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break included a strong reaction against established religious, political and social views.

Modernists believe the world is created in the act of perceiving it and that the world is what we say it is. All things are relative and there is no absolute truth.

Modernists feel no connection to history or institutions. Their experience is marked by alienation, loss, and despair. Modernists laude the individual and inner strength. They are also interested in the self conscious. The “Lost Generation” refers to the generations of young adults who lived following World War I, as reflected in the works of the major writers of the period, including John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein.

The events surrounding the Great war led to much disillusionment. The term “lost” is also a metaphor for the questioning of the principles of their parent’s generation. They lack of certainty, direction, and purpose led many to search for deeper meanings and truths (as had happened in several other periods of human society). In addition, the Harlem Renaissance refers to an era of written and artistic creativity among African-Americans that occurred after World War 1 and lasted until the middle of the 1930s Depression.

EX:
George Orwell, Animal Farm and 1984

Ernest Hemingway, the Sun Also Rises

The poetry of Robert Frost

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

The poetry of Langston Hughes

Question 36

Characteristics of Oral Tradition (Types)

Answer 36

Def: Oral tradition as stories is a fundamental component of culture. Literature that has origins in oral tradition includes stories that are passed down from generation by word of mouth. These stories are verbally transmitted in speech or song and include:

Ballads
Tall tales
Fables
Trickster stories
Fairy tales
Epics

Question 37

Ballads

Answer 37

The ballad is the most popular form and is still being written but it began in early literary periods before written literature was highly developed. Traditional or “popular” ballads are still very much a part of isolated segments of society, often among illiterate and semiliterate peoples.

In American folk music, ballads are embraced by peoples in the southern Appalachian Mountains, cowboys of the western plains, and people associated with labor movements, some of those marked by violence,

Certain common characteristics of early ballads should be noted: the supernatural often played an important part of events, physical courage and love were frequent themes, and incidents usually happened to common people (as opposed to nobility).

Action in a ballad is largely developed through dialogue and tragic situations are presented with the utmost simplicity. Incremental repetition is a common aspect of literature that begins as a ballad.

Question 38

Tall Tales

Answer 38

The tall tale is a kind of humorous tale common on the American frontier which uses realistic detail, a literal manner, and common speech to recount extravagantly impossible happenings, usually resulting from the superhuman abilities of a character.

The tales about Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett are typical frontier tall tales. The German Adventures of Baron Munchausen is, perhaps, the best known literary use of the tall tale.

Question 39

Fables

Answer 39

The fable, either in prose or verse, is told to point out a moral.

FAbles have to do with supernatural events or unusual incidents. Besides the most famous Aesop, a Greek slave living about 600 B.C., equally popular are those of La Fontaine, a Frenchman writing in the 17th century. His tales are distinctive in their humor and wit, their wisdom and their sprightly satire.

Other important fabulists are Gay (England), Lessing (Germany), and Krylov (Russia). A fable in which the characters are animals is called a beast fable, a form that has been popular in almost every period of literary history, usually as a satiric device to point out human follies. The best fable continues to be vigorous in such diverse works as Kipling’s Jungle Book and George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Question 40

Trickster Stories

Answer 40

Fables as trickster storeis are short narratives that use animal characters with human features to convey folk wisdom and to help people understand human nature and human behavior. These stories were originally passed down through oral tradition and were eventually written down.

The legendary figure Aesop was reported to have orally passed on his animal fables, which have been linked to earlier beast tales from INdia and were later written down by the Greeks and Romans. Ananse trickster tales derive from the Asante people of Ghana and were brought by African slaves to the Caribbean and parts of the U.S.

Question 41

Fairy Tales

Answer 41

The fairy tale is a story relating mysterious pranks and adventures of supernatural spirits who manifest themselves in the form of diminutive human beings. These spirits possess certain qualities which are constantly drawn upon fro tales of their adventures:supernatural wisdom and foresight, a mischeivous temperament, the power to regulate the affairs of human beings for good or evil, the capacity to change into any shape at any time.

Almost every nation has its own fairy literature, though the folklore element embodied in fairy tales prompts the growth of related tales among different nations. Some fo the great collections are the Contes de ma Mere l’Oyeo of Perrault (French), and those of the Grimm brothers in German, and Hans Christian Andersen of Denmark who may be the most famous writer of original fairy tales.

Question 42

Epics

Answer 42

An epic is a long poem written in a lofty style about the exploits of heroic figures. Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey”, as well as the Old English poem “Beowulf”, are examples of epics.

Epic conventions are literary practices, rules, or devices that became commonplace in epic poetry. Among the classical conventions Milton used are the following:

• The invocation of a muse: in which a writer requests divine help in composing his work.
• Telling a story with which readers or listeners are already familiar: they know the characters, the plot, and the outcome. Most of the great writers of the ancient world - as well as many great writers in later times, including Shakespeare - frequently told stories already known to the public.

Thus, in such stories, there were no unexpected plot twists, no surprise endings. If this sounds strange to you, the modern reader and theatergoer, consider that many of the most popular motion pictures today are about stories already known to the public.