See also children's book illustration.

The Beginnings of Children's Literature

The earliest of what came to be regarded as children's literature was first meant for adults. Among this ancient body of oral literature were myths and legends created to explain the natural phenomena of night and day and the changing seasons. Ballads, sagas, and epic tales were told by the fireside or in courts to an audience of adults and children eager to hear of the adventures of heroes. Many of these tales were later written down and are enjoyed by children today.

The first literature written specifically for children was intended to instruct them. During the Middle Ages the Venerable Bede, Aelfric, St. Aldhelm, and St. Anselm all wrote school texts in Latin, some of which were later used in schools in England and colonial America. More enjoyable and enduring fare came later when William Caxton, England's first printer, published Aesop's Fables (1484) and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485). The hornbook, invented at the end of the 15th cent., taught children the alphabet, numerals, and the Lord's Prayer. Alphabet books were popular in battledore and in chapbook form. The New England Primer (1689), the first children's book published in the American colonies, taught the alphabet along with prayers and religious exhortations.

The first distinctly juvenile literature in England and the United States consisted of gloomy and pious tales—mostly recounting the deaths of sanctimonious children—written for the edification of Puritan boys and girls. Out of this period came one classic for both children and adults, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678). Later works written for adults but adapted for children were Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726).

In 1729 the English translation of Charles Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose became popular in England. A collection of Mother Goose rhymes was published in 1765 by John Newbery, an English author and bookseller. Newbery was the first publisher to devote himself seriously to publishing for children. Among his publications were A Pretty Little Pocket Book (1744) and The Renowned History of Little Goody Two Shoes (1765). Pirated editions of Newbery's works were soon published in the United States by Isaiah Thomas and others.

By the end of the 18th cent., juvenile literature, partly under the influence of Locke and Rousseau, had again become didactic. This time the didacticism was of an intellectual and moralistic variety, as evidenced in the sober, uplifting books of such authors as Thomas Day, Mary Sherwood, and Maria Edgeworth in England and in the United States by Samuel Goodrich (pseud. Peter Parley) and Martha Finley (pseud. Martha Farquarson), who wrote the famous Elsie Dinsmore series.

A Flowering of Children's Literature

Contrasting with the didactic movement was 19th-century romanticism, which produced a body of literature that genuinely belonged to children. For the first time children's books contained fantasy and realism, fun and adventure, and many of the books written at that time are still popular today. Folk tales collected in Germany by the brothers Grimm were translated into English in 1823. The fairy stories of Hans Christian Andersen appeared in England in 1846. At the end of the 19th cent. Joseph Jacobs compiled English folk tales. Andrew Lang, a folklorist, began a series of fairy tales. Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense (1846) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses (1885) set the style for much of the poetry written for children today. Lewis Carroll's twin masterpieces Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) combine lunacy and fantasy with satire and word games.

Victorian family life is realistically depicted in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), whereas Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1880) emphasize adventure; all three books present fully developed characters. At the turn of the century several children's magazines were being published, the most important being the St. Nicholas Magazine (1887-1943).

Meanwhile, translations widened the world of the English-speaking child from the 19th cent. on; popular translated works include J. D. Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson (tr. from the German, 1814); Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio (tr. from the Italian, 1892); Felix Salten's Bambi (tr. from the German, 1928); Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince (tr. from the French, 1943); Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking (tr. from the Swedish, 1950); and Herta von Gebhardt's The Girl from Nowhere (tr. from the German, 1959).

The Twentieth Century

The contributions and innovations of the 19th cent. continued into the 20th cent., achieving a distinct place in literature for children's books, and spawning innumerable genres of children's literature. Fantasy written for children includes L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (1927), P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins (1934), J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" series, E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952) and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970), Madeleine L'Engle's science-fiction A Wrinkle in Time (1962), Lloyd Alexander's Book of Three (1964), Brian Jacques's medieval animal adventures in the Redwall series (1987-), and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books of wizardry and magic (7 vol., 1997-2007). Popular collections of humorous verse include Laura Richards's Tirra Lirra (1932), Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Verses (1941), John Ciardi's Reason for the Pelican (1959), and Arnold Spilka's Rumbudgin of Nonsense (1970).

Adventure and mystery are found in such works as Armstrong Sperry's Call It Courage (1941) and E. L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1968). The novel for children now includes many of the literary, psychological, and social elements found in its adult counterpart. Books with sophisticated emphasis on plot, mood, characterization, or setting are Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows (1908), Esther Forbes's Johnny Tremain (1944), Joseph Krumgold's And Now Miguel (1953), and Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins (1961). Mature treatment of the emotions of growing up characterizes Irene Hunt's Up a Road Slowly (1966), whereas William Armstrong's Sounder (1970) realistically portrays the experiences of a black sharecropper and his family.

From the 1960s through the 90s "socially relevant" children's books have appeared, treating subjects like death, drugs, sex, urban crisis, discrimination, the environment, and women's liberation. S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1980) and Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese (1977) are two novels that offer vivid portrayals of the sometimes unpleasant aspects of maturing. These books also reveal the trend toward a growing literature for teenagers. Other novelists that write convincingly of growing up in contemporary society include Ellen Raskin, Judy Blume, and Cynthia Voigt. Some critics consider these books as didactic as the children's books of the 17th and early 19th cent.

Another trend has been books written by children, especially poetry, such as Richard Lewis's Miracles (1966), a collection of poems written by children of many countries. During the 20th cent. in particular, new collections of tales that reach back to the oral roots of literature have come from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. International folktales have also received increasing attention. Among the many authors pursuing these themes, Verna Aardema compiles African folktales and Yoko Kawashima Watkins studies Asian oral traditions. During the 1980s and 90s in particular, multicultural concerns became an important aspect of the new realistic tradition in children's literature, as in Allen Say's tales of the Japanese-American immigrant experience.

The Newbery Medal, an award for the most distinguished work of literature for children, was established by Frederic Melcher in 1922; in 1938 he established a second award, the Caldecott Medal, for the best picture book of the year. An international children's book award, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, was given in 1970 for the first time to an American, Maurice Sendak, in recognition of his contribution to children's literature. His Where the Wild Things Are (1963) won him international acclaim and was followed by two sequels, In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Outside Over There (1981).

Magazines that review and discuss children's literature include The Horn Book, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and the School Library Journal in the United States and The Junior Bookshelf in Great Britain.

Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Ecclesiastical works in Old Church Slavonic were produced in the Middle Ages. Under Turkish and later Austrian domination a large body of orally transmitted folk poetry of great richness developed. The remarkable 16th-century flowering of learning and literature in the Adriatic trading city of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) was a reflection of the Italian Renaissance, spread by commercial contacts and by Slavic youths educated at Padua. It reached its apogee in Osman, the Croatian epic by Ivan Gundulić, and in the plays of Marin DrŽić (1508?-1567) and Junije Palmotić (1606-57).

The Eighteenth Century

Literature suffered a decline in the 18th cent., when Dubrovnik's political independence was crushed, and a general imitation of foreign writings took hold. However, the writing of history and biography was gaining prominence. Academies flourished, and the epic poems of the academician Ignat Dordić (1675-1737) were notable. The first national bard, Anora Kačić Miošić (1702-60), wrote his poems in ballad and folk style, while the moralist-philosopher Dositej Obradović (1742-1811) introduced fable writing into Yugoslav literature.

The Nineteenth Century: Nationalism and Romanticism

The southern Slavs experienced the general European nationalist upsurge in the late 18th and early 19th cent. In Slovenia this nationalism, which received much of its impetus from Germany, was weakened by a conflict between religious and secular writers. In Croatia the writers looked to Italy for inspiration; in Serbia, to Russia. South Slavic intellectuals responded with enthusiasm to the Pan-Slavism of the Slovak Jan Kollár.

Among the Croatians a cultural movement known as Illyrianism (named after the state established by Napoleon after the defeat of Austria at Wagram in 1809) acted as a stimulant to literature. Illyrianism was suffused with romanticism and nationalism; the latter theme expressed itself throughout the 19th cent. partly in terms of antagonism to Austro-Hungarian rule. An effort at a popular, integrated literature was inaugurated by three early romantic leaders—the Croat Ljudevit Gaj (1809-72), the Slovene Jernej Kopitar (1780-1844), and the Serb Vuk Stefanović KaradŽić. They developed a literary language based on popular speech. KaradŽić was also a great folklorist; his collections helped stimulate the romantic-nationalist movement.

Benefiting from these beginnings, by mid-century the Serbian lyric poet Branko Radičević (1824-53), the Slovene poet and political satirist Stanko Vraz (1810-51), and the Croatian Ivan MaŽuranić (1814-90)—whose epic The Death of Smail-Aga (1846, tr. 1918) tells of Christian-Muslim conflict in Turkish-ruled Herzegovina—had made important contributions to the movement. More technically perfect were the poems of France Prešeren (1800-1849), a disciple of Byron, and Petar Preradović, who cultivated medieval traditions. Considered far superior was the prince-bishop Petar Petrović Njegoš (1813-51), whose verse drama The Mountain Wreath (1847, tr. 1930) earned him the designation of the Montenegrin Shakespeare. Later romanticism is represented by Djura Jaksić (1832-78), writer of heroic, nationalistic dramas and poems, and Jovan Jovanović-Zmaj (1833-1903), a lyrical poet.

The Late Nineteenth Century: Realism and Psychological Interest

The rise of realism in the latter part of the 19th cent. furthered the development of the novel by such writers as the Serbs Simo Matavulj (1852-1908) and Jakov Ignatović (1824-88), whose penetrating studies portrayed the varied social classes of his region. Also important were the Croatian Evgenij Kumičić (1850-1904); and the Slovenes Josip Stritar (1836-1925) and Josip Jurcić (1844-81), both of whom portrayed Slovene society.

Many novelists of the period also wrote poetry and drama. Outstanding for versatility and abundant production were the popular Croatian writer August Šenoa (1838-81), who revealed Croat social decay and criticized German influence, and the greatest of all Slovenian writers, Ivan Cankar (1876-1918). The late 19th cent. also saw a growing interest in the psychology of motives and morals—a trend chiefly inspired by the writings of the Russian novelists Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The best known of the psychological novelists was the Croatian Ksaver Šandor Gjalski (1854-1935), who in a series of some 20 novels depicted the whole range of contemporary Croatian life.

In the drama, historical themes had predominated, as in the works of the Croatian Ivo Vojnović (1857-1929). In Croatia and in Slovenia dramatists broke with the cult of history and concerned themselves with psychology. Among these writers are the Croatians Milan Begović (1876-1948) and Josip Kosor and the Slovenian Anton Medved (1869-1911). Serbian drama, however, long remained primarily romantic in the manner of its founder Jovan Sterija-Popović (1806-56), although contemporary problems were treated in the comedies of Branislav Nusić (1864-1938), who was also a noted novelist, story writer, and essayist.

The Twentieth Century: A Variety of Literary Movements

During the first quarter of the 20th cent. the modernists sought to assimilate literary trends imported from France and Germany. Anton Aškerc (1856-1912) wrote historical poems of social revolt, while Vojislav Ilić (1862-94), Aleksa Santić (1868-1924), and Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević (1865-1908) were influenced by the Parnassians. The symbolists numbered not only the Serbs Jovan Dučić (1874-1943) and Milan Rakić (1876-1938), but also Oton Župančić (1878-1949), the greatest Slovene poet of this century, and Vladimir Nazor (1876-1949), Croatia's 20th-century literary giant. Outstanding critics were the Serbs Bogdan Popović (1863-1944) and Jovan Skerlić (1877-1914) and the Croatian Milan Marjanović (1879-1955).

During the 1930s socially conscious literature with local-color settings predominated. The Serbs Jovan Popović (1903-52) and Cedomir Minderović were among the more successful writers of this period. In Slovenia the epic novel flourished under such writers as Jus Kozak, Anton Ingolić, and Prezihov Voranc.

World War II produced a number of partisan poets, and war themes predominated in postwar writing. After 1944 when Macedonian was recognized as one of the official languages of Yugoslavia, writers sought to develop a literature based on Macedonia's rich folk heritage. Although the Communist regime imposed severe restrictions on writers, freedom from Soviet influence after 1949 and the cultural independence of several regions resulted in some innovation.

Among notable postwar writers have been Mladen Horvat; Marko Ristić; the Serbian poets Miloš Crnjanski and Rastko Petrović; the Macedonian poet Koca Racin; the Bosnian novelist and poet Ivo Andrić, who was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature; the Croatian poet and dramatist Miroslav KrleŽa; the Slovenian prose writer France Bek; the fabulist Miodrag Bulatović; the political writer Milovan Djilas; and the Serbian novelist Borislav Pekic. With the breakup of the Yugoslav federation in the early 1990s and the collapse of the effort (begun in 1918) to form a unified South Slavic nation, the differences between the major South Slavic literatures are likely to widen. Indeed, nationalists now speak of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian languages and have undertaken to "purify" them.

Early Works

The earliest Welsh literature is preserved in about half a dozen manuscripts written with one exception after the 12th cent. However, the literature was highly developed well before the Norman Conquest. Of early extant works the most important, the so-called Four Ancient Books of Wales, are The Book of Aneurin, The Book of Taliesin, The Black Book of Caemarthen, and The Red Book of Hergest. Much of the poetry in these manuscripts is credited to four late 6th-century bards—Aneurin, Taliesin, Myrddin (the Merlin of Arthurian romance), and Llywarch Hen—and most of the anonymous poetry is marked by style and subject as belonging to their various schools.

Early Welsh poetry is epic, romantic, and historical. Songs in praise of heroes (many pre-Christian and mythological) and elegiac poems of desolation and longing frequently appear. They are marked by a rich, musical style, displaying the verbal felicity of a highly developed art. Among early prose survivals, the classic is the Mabinogion (set down c.1060). In this work the cycle of stories concerning the old Celtic gods and heroes—similar to those in Irish and Arthurian literature—is expanded by the addition of later stories and partly transformed by numerous Welsh revisions.

Early medieval prose includes The History of the Kings of Britain and romances and stories of the Holy Grail, partly adopted from French and other sources, but showing native Welsh style and story innovations. In poetry, the Gogynfeirdd (early medieval period) eulogized the heroes of the North, but it is lyrical rather than epic. From c.1150 the bardic system, with its archaisms, its prescribed themes and meters, and its aim of "exquisiteness," flowered; of the several levels of bardic verse, eulogy was considered the highest and was preserved.

The Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries

The 14th cent. was a golden age in South Wales. Dafydd ap Gwilym, considered by many to be the greatest Welsh poet, broke the classical eulogistic traditions of the bards and established new horizons. Dafydd was influenced by Provençal poetry, but his verse was more informal and spontaneous. With a simpler, more personal diction and a fuller cognizance of nature than had been present in Welsh verse, he elevated love poetry over the eulogistic variety.

Dafydd influenced Welsh poetry for 200 years, inaugurating the Cywyddwyr period named after the cywydd meter (a 7-syllable rhymed couplet with alternating endings in masculine and feminine genders), which he introduced. This poetry achieved perfection in the 15th cent. and declined after the mid-16th. The bards overlaid the cywydd with an excessively formal, alliterative style, as they did with the more natural, spontaneous English poetry that began to be popular in the 16th cent.

After the 16th cent., social and political changes in Wales had marked effects, especially the anglicization of the Welsh gentry and the gradual decline of patronage for the native language. Influence from religious sources grew. Early modern Welsh prose standards were partly set by Bishop William Morgan's translation of the Bible (1583). Welsh humanist prose of the 16th and 17th cent., although not much published in the original tongue, was polished and musical.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In the 18th cent. theological and pedagogical writings dominated, but such authors as Morgan Llwyd, Theophilus Evans, and Ellis Wynn created clear, elegant prose classics. Religious feeling and the interest of the clergy were significant in keeping Welsh poetry alive during the 18th cent. The priest Goronwy Owen and other members of the "Morris School" attempted to assimilate the early, free cywydd poetry to modern situations. Meanwhile, the great Methodist hymnodists, William Williams (Pantycelyn) and Ann Griffiths, deriving elements from the abundant folk verse (penillion), created a more personal poetry in "free" meters. They were a potent influence on the 19th-century lyric poets, Ceiriog (John Ceiriog Hughes) and Islwyn.

Improved popular education, as sponsored by the Welsh-language publications of the Society for the Dissemination of Christian Knowledge, and increased Welsh political consciousness, as exemplified in the 19th cent. by the writings of Daniel Owens ("the Welsh Dickens"), gave rise to a literary revival that reached a high point in the 20th cent. In addition, the Welsh poetic revival, which produced both nationalist and cosmopolitan works, was tied to the founding in 1872 of the new Univ. of Wales.

The Twentieth Century

In the 20th cent. attempts at language purification, interest in Welsh mythology, and a turning away from earlier Welsh puritanism have accompanied influences ranging from the Greek classics to modern French symbolists in the making of a Welsh literary revival. Other dominating trends are the love of nature, the boldness of imagery, and the lilt of language, best represented in the free-metered works of W. J. Gruffydd and the more classical poetry of T. Gwynn-Jones. The short story has been developed to a high level by Dewi Williams, Islwyn Williams, and Kate Roberts.

The principal novelists of the 20th cent. include Kate Roberts, Tegla Davies, T. Rowland Hughes, and Islwyn Ffowc Ellis. Realistic drama was developed by R. G. Berry, D. T. Davies, Saunders Lewis, and W. J. Gruffydd. A more symbolic and psychological dramatic literature followed with the works of Huw Lloyd Edwards, T. Parry, and Gwilym R. Jones. The poet and dramatist Saunders Lewis has enriched Welsh critical writing. The eisteddfod remains a vigorous cultural force.

Kievan Church Slavonic texts of the 11th cent. and W Ukrainian texts of the 13th cent. show Ukrainian linguistic features, which predominate in the Galician-Volhynian chronicle of the 13th cent. and in much of the writing of the 14th-16th cent. Ukrainian oral literature attained its high point in the 16th cent. with the Cossack epic songs, the dumy. The first books printed in Ukrainian (16th cent.) were translations of the Gospels. A grammar appeared in 1596 and a dictionary in 1627. Ukrainian cultural life of the 17th cent. centered around the Kievan academy, established in 1633.

Gregory Skovoroda (1722-94) was the outstanding 18th cent. poet and philosopher. A leading early figure in the Ukrainian literary revival was Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769-1838), whose travesty of the Aeneid and operetta Natalka Poltavka are major works of Ukrainian classical literature. Classicism predominates also in the writings of the novelist Gregory Kvitka (1778-1843) and in the plays of Vasil Gogol (d. 1825). Interest in folklore and ethnography is represented in the works of Levko Borovykovsky (1806-89) and Ambros Metlynsky (1814-70), poets of the Kharkiv romantic school.

With the founding in the 1830s of a university in Kiev, the capital became once again the cultural center of Ukraine. The leading scholar of the period was the historian Mikola Kostomarov (1817-85). The poet Taras Shevchenko was the great figure of Ukrainian romanticism, represented also in the dramatic works of Michael Staritsky (1840-1904), Marko Kropivnitsky (1840-1910), and Ivan Tobilevich (1845-1907). Realism in Ukrainian prose found expression in the works of Boris Hrinchenko (1863-1910) and Ivan Nechuy-Levitsky (1838-1918) and in the naturalistic tales of Marko Vovchok (pseud. of Maria Markovich, 1834-1907).

Turn-of-the-century Ukrainian literature is also represented by the outstanding writer Ivan Franko and the poet Lesia Ukrainka. Michael Kotsiubynsky (1864-1913) and Vasil Stefanyk (1871-1936) were masters of impressionist prose. Major early 20th cent. literary figures include the novelist Olha Kobylanska (1868-1942) and the novelist and political writer Vladimir Vinnichenko. Many Ukrainian writers were killed or deported by the Soviet regime during the 1930s, among them the dramatist Mikola Kulish (1892-1934), the humorist Ostap Vyshnia, and the theorist of neoclassicism Mikola Zerov.

One of the leading writers of the proletarian age, Mikola Khvylovy (1893-1933), proposed the reorientation of Ukrainian literature toward the West. Important writers who survived the purges of the 1930s include the master of subjective verse Maxim Rylsky, the neo-romantic poet Mikola Bazhan, the lyric poet Pavlo Tychyna, the dramatist Aleksandr Korneichuk, and the novelists Oles Honchar and Michael Stelmakh. The thaw that occurred after Stalin's death was followed by the reimposition of strict censorship in 1964. A number of writers circulated their work clandestinely, and some was later published in the West. Whether the breakup of the Soviet Union, and Ukrainian independence, will produce a surge in the country's literary life remains to be seen.

From Early Works to the Sixteenth Century

Swedish literature may have flourished in early medieval times, but few written traces remain. Historical chronicles, religious writings, and ballads and verse in Swedish are extant from the 12th cent. The earliest major religious writer was St. Bridget of Sweden (c.1300-1373). As Danish influence grew after the Kalmar Union (1397), there was a period of literary decline.

Of note in the 15th cent. were the poems of Bishop Thomas of Strängnäs (d. 1443) in praise of liberty. The Reformation (16th cent.) conferred a somber spirit upon Sweden, and few secular works were written. The theological and historical works of Olaus Petri (1493-1552) are notable for beginning the linguistic transition to modern Swedish. Petri also assisted in the great Swedish translation of the Bible (1540-41), a project directed by his brother Laurentius Petri (1499-1573).

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Sweden's emergence by 1648 as a great power was not accompanied by comparable literary splendor, but under Queen Christina continental influence helped to bring about a literary renaissance. Georg Stiernhielm (1598-1672) wrote verse that was sophisticated both in form and in content, combining classical idealism with a Gothic strain. The folk songs in medieval style of Lasse Lucidor (1638-74) and the baroque rhymes of Gunno Dahlstjerna (1661-1709) were outstanding among poetical works.

Ideas of the Enlightenment, introduced by Olof von Dalin in the 1730s, spread steadily, and great mystical intellectualism was set forth in the numerous works of Emanuel Swedenborg. The greatest Swedish poet of the age, Carl Michael Bellman, wrote superb verse inspired by traditional Swedish songs. In the reign of Gustavus III, founder of the Swedish Academy in 1786, the important court circle of writers included the eminent poet and critic Johan Henrik Kellgren. The great scientist Carolus Linnaeus also made enormously influential contributions to Swedish literature. Classical standards were upheld by the academy, but the sentimentality of Rousseau and other European writers, strongly defended by Thomas Thorild (1759-1808), began to permeate the middle classes in the late 18th cent.

The Nineteenth Century

When romanticism flowered in the golden age of Swedish poetry (c.1820-1840), the movement became Germanic in character and conservative in tone; many of its themes were taken from folk culture. Historical and folk interests are typified by the work of A. A. Afzelius. Three of the finest romantic poets were Erik Geijer, Per Atterbom, and Esaias Tegnér.

The tales of C. J. L. Almquist show the development of Swedish prose and also serve to divide the declining romantic movement from the literary ferment of the 1840s. By mid-century a mild utilitarianism and social criticism, modeled along English lines, was prevalent in Swedish literature and journalism. Fredrika Bremer gained international renown as a reporter, author, and activist for women's rights. Another major spokesman for an idealistic vision was the philosopher Abraham Viktor Rydberg.

The first true realism appeared with the dramatist August Strindberg and a group of writers called the Young Sweden, among them Victoria Benedictsson and Gustaf af Geijerstam. They were followed by a movement toward creative individualism. Verner von Heidenstam was an aristocratic exponent of personal expression, and the poet Gustaf Fröding and the novelist Selma Lagerlöf followed equally personal paths.

The Twentieth Century

In the early 20th cent. the fiction of Hjalmar Söderberg presaged a renewed emphasis on restraint and realism. Ludvig Nordström, Gustaf Hellström, and Elin Wägner were leading novelists of the 1910s and 20s. Proletarian themes were developed after World War I by Vilhelm Moberg, Ivar Lo-Johansson, Moa Martinsson, and Martin Koch. The Nobel laureate Pär Lagerkvist developed and sustained Swedish expressionism, as did the novelist Hjalmar Bergman and the poet Birger Sjöberg. Modernism, with its emphasis on experimental form, was a strong trend in the 1920s and after; among its leading exponents were Karin Boye and Gunnar Ekelöf.

A number of fine writers emerged both before and after World War II, including the novelist Eyvind Johnson (who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in literature with the Swedish poet Harry Martinson), Ivar Lo-Johansson, and Agnes von Krusenstierna. Leading Swedish writers of the late 20th cent. include the novelists Sven Delblanc, Kerstin Ekman, Lars Gustaffson, P.C. Jersild, and Sara Lidman; the poets Tomas Tranströmer, Göran Palm, and Göran Sønnevi; and the dramatists Per Olov Enquist and Lars Norén.

Iberian Literature before Spanish

Literature flourished on the Iberian Peninsula long before the evolution of the modern Spanish language. The Latin writers Seneca, Lucan, Martial, and Quintilian are among those who were born or who lived in Spain before the separation of the Romance languages. Twentieth-century research has uncovered texts of the 10th and 11th cent. written by Muslims and Jews living in Spain.

Early Works in Castilian Spanish

The famous early classic of Spanish literature, the sober and unornamented epic poem Cantar de Mío Cid (12th cent.), deals with the life and deeds of the national hero, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called the Cid Campeador. In the 13th cent. many other epic poems as well as the oldest popular lyrics appeared in the different provinces of the Iberian Peninsula. The first Spanish poet whose name is known is the priest Gonzalo de Berceo. Under the patronage of King Alfonso X (1221-84), himself a writer, Castilian prose was developed and many Arabic and Hebrew works were translated into Castilian.

In the 14th cent. the most important writers were López de Ayala, whose poem Rimado de palacio satirized the customs of the age; Fán Pérez de Guzmán, author of the historical Generaciones y semblanzas; the prince Don Juan Manuel, nephew of King Alfonso X, whose Libro de los exemplos del conde Lucanor et de Patronio was the first book of short stories in Spanish; and the satirical poet Juan Ruiz.

During the reign of John II of Castile in the first half of the 15th cent., two important poets were Juan de Mena and the marqués de Santillana, both of whom wrote under Italian influence. The Italian poetic forms were to be of great importance in aiding Spanish verse to grow beyond folk art and pseudo-Provençal, but they were not assimilated into Spanish letters for another century. The outstanding prose work of the period was the novel La Celestina (1499), attributed to Fernando de Rojas.

The Renaissance and the Golden Age of Spanish Literature

The first known novel of chivalry, Amadis of Gaul, was printed in Zaragoza in 1508 and served as a model for the novels of chivalry that became (16th cent.) the most popular genre in Spain, together with the anonymous ballads (romances) that were sung and recited everywhere. Meanwhile the spirit of the Renaissance had been invading Spanish letters, and Spain had also become a dominant European power. In the reign of Emperor Charles V, the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, was published (1554); the identity of its author has remained a mystery.

The latter part of the 16th cent. and most of the 17th cent. made up the great era of Spanish literature, known as the Golden Age. At the start of this period the poet Garcilaso de la Vega, stimulated by the work of Juan Boscán Almogáver, succeeded in mastering the meter and essence of Italian verse and in acclimating it to the Spanish spirit, thus revolutionizing Spanish poetry. The chief prose monument of the Golden Age, and one of the masterpieces of world literature, is the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The picaresque novel flourished; notable examples are those of Mateo Alemán and Francisco de Quevedo. Baltasar Gracián was a leading didactic prose writer.

The Golden Age also produced many superb playwrights. Lope de Vega Carpio, one of the most prolific authors of all time, wrote a multitude of dramas, comedies, and religious plays. Tirso de Molina, Guillén de Castro y Bellvís, and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón were also outstanding playwrights. Calderón de la Barca was the last and probably the best dramatist of the epoch.

Also part of the Golden Age were the great Spanish mystics St. Theresa of Ávila, author of an inspired spiritual autobiography, and her disciple St. John of the Cross, one of Spain's finest lyric poets. Fray Luis Ponce de León wrote exquisite pastorals and Fernando de Herrera left stirring odes, but the most influential poet of the period was Luis de Góngora y Argote, whose precious, ornate verse was the most extreme expression of the baroque in Spanish literature; a cultivated, affected style known as Gongorism dominated Spanish letters in the latter half of the 17th cent.

The Eighteenth Century

In the 18th cent. French neoclassicism exerted a powerful—and inhibiting—influence on Spanish literature. The Poética of Ignacio de Luzán reflected the academic principles of the epoch. An important essayist was Benito Gerónimo Feyjóo y Montenegro, a Benedictine who helped to usher the Enlightenment into Spain.

Three authors stood out as notable exceptions in the midst of a general decline in literary creativity: Leandro Fernández de Moratín, a writer of plays in the neoclassic vein; Ramón de la Cruz, author of popular playlets called sainetes; and the poet Juan Meléndez Valdés. While Manuel Quintana's patriotic verse was neoclassical in form, it anticipated romanticism in its emotion.

The Nineteenth Century and Romanticism

During the first years of the 19th cent. the rigors of the Napoleonic occupation virtually snuffed out intellectual creativity in Spain. Then in 1833, with the death of Fernando VII, romanticism swept the country like a grass fire; its ascendancy was dramatic but superficial. Much of the work of the leading romantic authors—Ángel de Saavedra, duque de Rivas, José de Espronceda, and José Zorrilla y Moral—echoed French and English models, but Mariano José de Larra displayed originality in his admirable satirical sketches.

Two gifted post-romantic poets were Rosalía de Castro (writing in Galician) and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Larra's sketches were outstanding examples of costumbrismo—the literary depiction of local color, customs, and types—a genre that in Spain led to and was intimately associated with naturalism and realism.

Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Movements

The towering figure of Benito Pérez Galdós dominated the realistic novel during the second half of the 19th cent., but Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, José María de Pereda, Armando Palacio Valdés, Juan Valera y Alcalá Galiano, and Emilia Pardo Bazán also wrote notable fiction. Realism continued to have leading exponents well into the 20th cent., notably Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, but at the turn of the century the intellectual and literary life of Spain underwent a deep transformation. With the loss of its colonial empire and the disastrous effects of the Carlist wars, Spain was economically and culturally bankrupt.

At the end of the century the writers of the Generation of '98, stimulated by French and German influences and by Rubén Darío and the modernismo movement in Spanish America, set out to reevaluate and revitalize the cultural life of Spain. Ángel Ganivet, a precursor, had foreshadowed their work in his Idearium español. Miguel de Unamuno, as essayist, poet, novelist, and educator, emphasized the quixotic aspect of Spanish values and exerted great influence on Spanish youth. Azorín (see Martínez Ruiz) created memorable impressionistic sketches. Ramón del Valle Inclán brought a poetic sense of the fantastic and the bizarre to his novels and plays. Pío Baroja y Nessi infused his novels with a fierce independence of spirit that rejected all traditional values and sought to arouse people to action.

The drama, whose only notable exponent in the late 19th cent. had been José Echegaray, was revitalized in the early 20th cent. by Jacinto Grau, Gregorio Martínez Sierra, and especially by Jacinto Benavente y Martínez. A major role in the Spanish cultural revival was played by the great educator Francisco Giner de los Ríos.

After World War I the intellectual currents set in motion by the Generation of '98 merged with other forces in the European avant-garde to create a mainstream that fertilized Spanish cultural life until the outbreak of the civil war. Criticism, which had flourished at the turn of the century under the erudite Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, reached new heights in the works of the distinguished medievalist Ramón Menéndez Pidal. The humorist Ramón Gómez de la Serna wrote his inimitable greguerías.

It was in poetry, however, that Spanish literature produced its greatest achievements. The lyrics of Antonio Machado and of the great Juan Ramón Jiménez are among the finest in the language. José Moreno Villa, Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillén, Dámaso Alonso, and many others formed a brilliant constellation of poets, but the most engaging figure was that of the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca.

Parallel to these developments in poetry was the work of one of Spain's most gifted essayists—José Ortega y Gasset. The novelist Ramón Pérez de Ayala used his novels as a forum for intellectual discussion, whereas Gabriel Miró Ferrer wrote novels that can be considered lyric prose poems, and Benjamín Jarnés produced surrealist novels. The novels of Ramón Sender marked a return to social criticism.

The Spanish Civil War to the Present

The Spanish civil war (1936-39) truncated the cultural evolution of the country. Many writers went into exile. Salinas, Guillén, Juan Larrea, and others distinguished themselves abroad. Among the novelists to emerge after the Spanish civil war were Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela, Carman Laforet, and José María Gironella. Salvador de Madariaga became known as a biographer and historian. In the 1950s and 60s a gradual return to political and literary normality was noticeable.

Writers whose literary reputations have been established since World War II include the novelists Max Aub, Miguel Delibes, Juan Goytisolo, Ana María Matute, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Luís Martín-Santos, and Gonzalo Torrente-Ballester; the poets Manuel Altoaguirre and Gerardo Diego; and the playwrights Antonia Buero Vallejo, Alejandro Casona, and Alfonso Sastre.

Reflecting Western European developments, post-Franco Spanish writing has been marked by a great deal of formal experimentation. Among the important novelists are Juan Benet, Carmen-Martín-Gaite, Eduardo Mendonza, Soledad Puértolas, Carmen Riera, and Ana Maria Moix. Dramatists include Férnando Arrabel, Antonio Gala, Fermín Cabal, and Alonso de Santos. Among the poets are Ana Rossetti, Antonio Carvajal, Guillermo Carnero, Jaime Silas, and Antonio de Villena.

See also Spanish literature; Portuguese literature; Brazilian literature.

The Colonial Era

The history of Spanish American literature begins with the writings of the explorers, soldiers, and missionaries who participated in the conquest of the New World. Their writings, eyewitness accounts of the discovery, the conquest, the existing civilizations, and the natural wonders of the flora and fauna, form the literature of the early colonial period. These chronicles, letters, histories, religious pieces, and epic poems are the vibrant and fascinating expression of those who fought for church, crown, and gold.

The letters of Christopher Columbus to Ferdinand V and Isabella I and those of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, to Charles V are among the classics of this period. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of the soldiers of Cortés, wrote a remarkable history of the conquest of Mexico, and the history by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas of the destruction of the Indies made him the "apostle of the Indians" and the author of the "black legend" of Spain.

Early poetry includes Chile's epic poem, La Araucana (1569-89; tr. 1945) by Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, a soldier who described the conflict between the Spaniards and the Araucanians of Chile. The epic tradition was continued by Diego de Hajeda and Bernardo de Balbuena. Among the first of those born in the New World to write about it, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega described the history of the Incas and of Peru.

With the growth of Spanish colonial society in America came the concomitant growth of literary circles, especially in the viceregal capitals of Mexico City and Lima. The writings of the time were imitative of 17th-century Spanish literature. Several notable figures were Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, the Mexican-born playwright, generally considered one of the great Spanish dramatists; Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexican nun, feminist, and intellectual, known for her lyric poetry, plays, and prose; and the Peruvian Juan del Valle y Caviedes, known for his satiric poetry and sharp wit.

The Nineteenth Century: Nationalism and Romanticism

The colonial period in Spanish American history and letters came to an end with the wars for independence in the early 19th cent. Prose writers and poets, imbued with the ideals of revolution and the nationalism of independence, expressed their thoughts in fiery prose and heroic verse. Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, is known for his analyses of the political scene as well as for his military exploits.

The Mexican José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi became famous as an ardent propagandist and pamphleteer. Basically a journalist, he is remembered as the author of the first Spanish American novel, The Itching Parrot (1816; tr. 1942), a work in the picaresque genre. José Joaquín Olmedo celebrated the victories of Bolívar in a heroic poem in the classical style entitled La victoria de Junín: Canto a Bolívar (1825). Andrés Bello, the Venezuelan humanist, educator, and poet, also sang of America in his serene A Georgic of the Tropics (1826; tr. 1954).

With political independence from Spain achieved, except in the island countries of the Caribbean, cultural independence swept the region, aided by the romantic tenets of freedom, emotional intensity, and individualism. For a while, classic forms coexisted with romanticism as in the poetry of José María Heredia of Cuba. His En el teocalli de Cholula [in the temple-pyramid of Cholula] (1820) is the first Spanish American romantic poem.

Among the early romanticists were the young intellectuals who fled from the tyranny of Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina. Esteban Echeverría expressed himself in the poetic narrative La cautiva [the captive] (1827). Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, also of Argentina, was not only the leading exponent of romanticism but also a prolific writer and educator. His Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants (1845; tr. 1960), a study of personalism in politics, is among the classics of Spanish American letters.

The emphasis on the national scene, so characteristic of romanticism, gave rise to the gaucho literature of Argentina and Uruguay, an indigenous literary genre. The gaucho, long the hero of popular tales and ballads, became the subject of some of the most original verse of the century in the poetry of Rafael Obligado, Estanislao del Campo, and in the classic Martín Fierro (1872-79; tr. 1948) of José Hernández. The romanticist's interest in the search for his native roots can be seen in the epic poem Tabaré (1886; tr. 1956) of Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, and in the historical anecdotes and sketches, the Knights of the Cape and 37 Other Selections from Tradiciones peruanas (1872-1910; tr. 1945), of Ricardo Palma.

Several novels of the period reflect the various trends in letters. Amalia (1851-55; tr. 1919), by José Mármol, deals with life in Argentina under Juan Manuel de Rosas; Martín Rivas (1862; tr. 1918), by Alberto Blest Gana of Chile, depicts the life and customs of Chile; María (1867; tr. 1890) is the tragic idyll of Jorge Isaacs of Colombia; and Cumandá (1871), by Ecuador's Juan León Mera, is a romantic portrayal of native life.

This same period produced some of Spanish America's most notable essayists. Juan Montalvo of Ecuador wielded his pen against the tyranny of García Moreno; Eugenio María de Hostos of Puerto Rico championed the cause of the independence and union of the islands of the Antilles; and Manuel González Prada of Peru attacked the entire social and economic system of his country and spoke out in defense of the indigenous peoples.

Modernismo

The writers of Spanish America in the last quarter of the 19th cent. broke with the nationalistic expression of the previous generation and immersed themselves in a world of artifice. These were the modernistas, who believed in "art for art's sake" and were influenced by the French Parnassian and symbolist schools. They wrote on rare and exotic themes and experimented with language and meter.

Those who initiated this literary movement, known as modernismo, were the Mexican Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, the Colombian José Asunción Silva, and the Cubans Julián del Casal and José Martí, the latter known also for his struggle to gain Cuba's independence from Spain. The movement reached its peak with the publication of the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío's Selected Poems (tr. 1965), which influenced writers throughout Spanish America and many in Spain. Among others there were Amado Nervo of Mexico, José Santos Chocano of Peru, Ricardo Jaimes Freyre of Bolivia, Guillermo Valencia of Colombia, Julio Herrera y Reissig and José Enrique Rodó of Uruguay, and Leopoldo Lugones of Argentina.

Early-Twentieth-Century Trends

With the passing of modernismo, poetry was influenced by many trends and movements. Three women poets, Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarbourou, and the Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, are known for their impassioned lyrics. Among the poets of the avant-garde movements in poetry were Vicente Huidobro of Chile, César Vallejo of Peru, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina, and Chile's Pablo Neruda, also a Nobel laureate.

The prose writers largely turned their attention to social themes. Following a tradition perfected by Martí, González Prada, and Rodó, the 20th-century essay reached new heights of intensity in the writings of José Vasconcelos of Mexico, known for his cultural theory as well as his participation in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and in the educational reform of his country. The essay was cultivated in a more artistic and aesthetic form by the scholarly Alfonso Reyes of Mexico and by Pedro Henríquez Ureña of the Dominican Republic. Later on Mariano Picón-Salas of Venezuela and Germán Arciniegas of Colombia made the essay the vehicle of social, historical, and political ideas in Spanish America. Those who cultivated the novel and short story in the early 20th cent. also tended mainly toward social protest and probed the roots of injustice and oppression in humanity.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 produced a subgenre—generally first-hand accounts of aspects of the revolution. The classic work of this genre is The Underdogs (1915; tr. 1963) by Mariano Azuela. Other works of this type include The Eagle and the Serpent (1928, tr. 1930) by Martín Luis Guzmán, and El indio [the indian] (1935; tr. 1937) by Gregorio López y Fuentes. The indigenous people, the poor, the underdog of any sort now entered literature as an urgent social problem and not as an element of local color. Representative of this indigenista literature are Raza de bronce [bronze race] (1919) by the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas, El mundo es ancho y ajeno [broad and alien is the world] (1941) by the Peruvian Ciro Alegría, and Huasipungo (1934; tr. 1964) by the Ecuadorian Jorge Icaza.

The struggle between humanity and the forces of nature, whether on the plains, in the tropics, or in the cities, was a challenging subject for novels and short stories. The life of the gaucho on the Argentine pampas is depicted in the novel El inglés de los güesos [the Englishman with the bones] (1924) by Benito Lynch, and in Don Segundo Sombra (1926; tr. 1935) by Ricardo Güiraldes. Life on the Venezuelan plains is portrayed in Doña Bárbara (1929; tr. 1931) by Rómulo Gallegos.

The tropics, replete with struggles of man against man as well as man against nature, are dramatically described in the short stories of the Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga and in the novel The Vortex (1924; tr. 1935), by Colombia's José Eustasio Rivera. Urban society with its many social problems is the theme of the novels of Federico Gamboa of Mexico and Manuel Gálvez of Argentina and the short stories of Manuel Rojas of Chile.

With the passage of time the novel and short story became more removed from the geographical and social problems of Spanish America and became more immersed in the universal currents of literature. There were the psychological novels of Chile's Eduardo Barrios and Argentina's Ernesto Sábato, the existential works of Argentina's Eduardo Mallea, and the poetic novels of Mexico's Agustín Yáñez.

Late-Twentieth-Century Literature

The state of Spanish American letters from the middle to the end of the 20th cent. was extremely rich, especially in the novel and poetry. Both genres received great critical acclaim outside the Spanish-speaking world and were widely translated into English and many other languages. Guatemala's Nobel Prize-winning Miguel Angel Asturias combined mythological and social themes in works such as The President (1946; tr. 1963) and The Bejeweled Boy (1961; tr. 1972). Cuba's Alejo Carpentier captured the world of magic and superstition in The Lost Steps (1953; tr. 1956) and The Harp and the Shadow (1979; tr. 1990), and gave the name of magic realism to the rich and influential blend of the ordinary and fantastic that characterized many Spanish American novels of the 1960s and later. Meanwhile, Mexico's Juan Rulfo recreated a poetic world of reality and fantasy in Pedro Páramo (1955; tr. 1959).

The Argentine Jorge Luis Borges' philosophical allegories (including Ficciones [1944; tr. 1962]) brilliantly combined the real with the fantastic, and his younger compatriot Julio Cortázar gained renown for Hopscotch (1963; tr. 1966), his masterpiece of experimental fiction. Carlos Fuentes of Mexico is one of the most eminent modern novelists (The Death of Artemio Cruz [1962; tr. 1964, 1991]), along with Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru (The Green House [1966; tr. 1968]), and, most of all, the 1982 Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia (A Hundred Years of Solitude [1967; tr. 1970]).

See also African literature.

Although Afrikaans had emerged as a distinctive language by the mid-18th cent., Dutch remained the official language in government and was compulsory in the schools. The pressure of nationalism led finally to the legal recognition of Afrikaans in 1925, and it replaced Dutch completely. There soon emerged several authors writing in Afrikaans. Notable among them was C. J. Langenhoven, who wrote novels and poems, translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam into Afrikaans, and wrote the words of the national anthem. His efforts led to the compilation of an Afrikaans dictionary.

Other well-known Afrikaans writers were the poets Christian L. Leipoldt, Christiaan M. van der Heever, and Eugene Marais. A. A. Pienaar under the pseudonym Sangiro wrote nature stories. Uys Krige was extremely versatile; his works include novels, short stories, poems, and plays in both Afrikaans and English. Important poets who have written in Afrikaans include W. E. G. Louw and his brother N. P. van Wyk Louw, Adam Small, Ingred Jonker, and Elisabeth Eybers.

At first the limited local market retarded the development of an indigenous English-language literature. With the growth of the publishing industry, an increasing population, and the spread of education, a vital literary community developed in the mid-20th cent. In addition, many African writers, divorced from their ethnic heritage, began to write in English. One of the best known among the English-language novelists is Olive Schreiner, author of The Story of an African Farm (1883); she is considered the first great South African novelist.

Other important novelists include Sarah G. Millin, whose major work is God's Stepchildren (1924); William Plomer, who wrote Turbott Wolfe (1925); Alan Paton, whose novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) was widely acclaimed in America; and Elizabeth C. Webster, who won an English prize for Ceremony of Innocence (1949). Roy Campbell is known as a South African poet, although he lived in England after 1926. Besides numerous other works, Stuart Cloete wrote Turning Wheels (1939), a story of the Great Trek, which was made into a film in the United States. Other internationally known works include H. V. Morton's In Search of South Africa (1948) and Episode in the Transvaal (1955) by Harry Bloom, who also wrote the book for the first all-African opera, King Kong (1958).

In the 1950s and 60s the magazine Drum was an important voice for African writers such as Lewis Nkosi and Ezekiel Mphahlele. Mphahlele wrote Down Second Avenue (1959), an autobiographical account of life in one of Johannesburg's African townships, and Voices in the Whirlwind (1972), a collection of essays about South Africa. Other writers who gained prominence in the 1950s and 60s include Jack Cope, Nadine Gordimer, Frans Ventner, Bessie Head, Dan Jacobson, Peter Abrahams, Alex La Guma, Sonya Rollnick, Laurens Van Der Post, David Lytton, and Athol Fugard. Many of these writers deal with the conditions of apartheid in South Africa. In the 1970s and 80s writers such as Miriam Tlali, Dennis Brutus, and J. M. Coetzee gained recognition for their eloquent protests of their racially segregated society.

Introduction

The literature is divided into two main periods—the Vedic (c.1500-c.200 B.C.), when the Vedic form of Sanskrit generally prevailed, and the Sanskrit (c.200 B.C.-c.A.D. 1100), when classical Sanskrit (a development of Vedic) predominated. Sanskrit had, however, become the standard language of the court by 400 B.C., and its early literature overlapped the Vedic. The word Sanskrit means "perfected," and the language was adopted as an improvement of the Vedic.

The Vedic Period

The first part of the Vedic period (c.1500-c.800 B.C.), that of the Veda, was a poetic and creative age, but afterward (c.800-c.500 B.C.) the priestly class transferred its energies to sacrificial ceremonial. They produced the Brahmanas, prose commentaries, in a later form of Vedic, explaining the relations of the Vedas (which had become sacred texts) to the ceremonials of the Vedic religion. In time the Brahmanas, like the Vedas, came to be considered sruti [Skt.,=hearing, i.e., revealed].

All later works, in contrast, are called smriti [Skt.,=memory or tradition] and are considered to be derived from the ancient sages. The later portions of the Brahmanas are theosophical treatises; since they were meant to be studied in the solitude of the forest, they are called Aranyakas [forest books]. The final parts of the Aranyakas are the philosophical Upanishads [secret doctrine] (see Vedanta). In language structure the Aranyakas and the Upanishads approach classical Sanskrit.

The Sutras [Skt.,=thread or clue] were written in the third and final stage (c.500-c.200 B.C.) of the Vedic period. They are treatises dealing with Vedic ritual and customary law. They were written to fulfill the need for a short survey in mnemonic, aphoristic form of the past literature, which by this time had assumed massive proportions. There are two forms of sutra; the Srauta Sutras, based on sruti, which developed the ritualistic side, and the Grihya Sutras, based on smriti. Those Grihya Sutras dealing with social and legal usage are the Dharma Sutras, the oldest source of Indian law (see Manu).

The body of works composed in the Sutra style was divided into six Vedangas [members of the Veda]—Siksha [phonetics], Chhandas [meter], Vyakarana [grammar], Nirukta [etymology], Kalpa [religious practice], and Jyotisha [astronomy]. A sutra that is particularly well known in the West is the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana concerning the art and practice of love. Linguistic standards were stereotyped in the middle of the sutra period by the grammar of Panini (c.350 B.C.), regarded as the starting point of the Sanskrit period.

The Sanskrit Period

Nearly all Sanskrit literature, except that dealing with grammar and philosophy, is in verse. The first period (c.500-c.50 B.C.) of the Sanskrit age is one of epics. They are divided into two main groupings—the natural epics, i.e., those derived from old stories, and those which come from artificial epics called kavya. The oldest and most representative of the natural school is the Mahabharata, while the oldest and best-known of the artificial epics is the Ramayana. The Puranas, a group of 18 epics, didactic and sectarian in tone, are a direct offshoot of the Mahabharata.

In the court epics (c.200 B.C.-c.A.D. 1100), most of which were derived from the Ramayana, subject matter gradually became subordinated to form, and elaborate laws were set up to regulate style. The lyric poems are artificial in technique and mainly stanzaic. The most common form, the sloka, developed from the Vedic anushtubh, a stanza of four octosyllabic lines. Part of the lyric poetry is comprised of gemlike miniatures, portraying emotion and describing nature; most of it is erotic. However, many lyrics are ethical in tone. These reflect the doctrine of the transmigration of souls in a prevailing melancholy tone and stress the vanity of human life.

Sanskrit drama (c.A.D. 400-A.D. 1100) had its beginnings in those hymns of the Rig-Veda which contain dialogues. Staged drama probably derives from the dance and from religious ceremonial. It is characterized by the complete absence of tragedy; death never occurs on the stage. Other typical features are the alternation of lyrical stanzas with prose dialogue and the use of Sanskrit for some characters and Prakrit for others (see Prakrit literature).

In Sanskrit drama the stories are borrowed from legend, and love is the usual theme. The play almost always opens with a prayer and is followed by a dialogue between the stage manager and one of the actors, referring to the author and the play. There were no theaters, so the plays were performed in the concert rooms of palaces. The most famous drama was the Sakuntala of Kalidasa. Other major dramatists were Bhasa, Harsa, and Bhavabhuti (see Asian drama).

There is a didactic quality in all of Sanskrit literature, but it is most pronounced in fairy tales and fables (c.A.D. 400-A.D. 1100). Characteristically, different stories are inserted within the framework of a single narration. The characters of the tale themselves tell stories until there are many levels to the narrative. The Panchatantra is the most important work in this style. The sententious element reached its height in the Hitopadesa, which was derived from the Panchatantra.

Sanskrit literature of the modern period consists mainly of academic exercises. The main body of modern Indian literature is written in various vernacular languages as well as in English.

Early Literature

Russian literature was first produced after the introduction of Christianity from Byzantium in the 10th cent. Byzantine influence, which suffused the culture of Kievan Rus, explains the adoption of Church Slavonic as the religious and literary language. Early Church Slavonic literature was overwhelmingly religious in character and didactic in intent, although some movement toward a literary purpose marked the chronicles attributed to the friar Nestor. More original were the byliny, oral folk lays, which fused Christian and pagan traditions and at times achieved the level of great epic poetry.

The first written masterpiece of Russian literature was The Song of Igor's Campaign (c.1187; see Igor), which towered above the general cultural desolation under Tatar domination. A few notable sermons and lives of saints were written in this period, and in the early 15th cent. the priest Sophonia of Ryazan wrote the epic Beyond the River Don to commemorate the victory over the Tatars at Kulikovo (1380). Athanasy Nikitin (d. 1472) wrote a distinguished account of his Journey beyond Three Seas to distant lands.

The rise of the grand duchy of Moscow and the overthrow of the Tatars was followed by an expansion of literary activity, still largely in a religious vein. Russian literature in general was hampered by the autocratic regime of the czars and by political and religious turmoil, although these conditions generated the few exceptional works of the 16th and 17th cent. The recriminatory correspondence between Czar Ivan IV and Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbsky (c.1528-83), who had deserted to the Poles, showed polemical and linguistic mastery. The great schism that rent the Russian Church in the mid-17th cent. produced the memorable autobiography of the archpriest Avvakum (martyred 1682), the first work in colloquial Russian.

Western Influence: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Western influence was manifest in the 17th cent. in numerous translations and in the establishment (1662) of the first theater in Russia. Under Peter I the Westernizing process was enormously accelerated; at the same time the Russian alphabet was revised and Russian works began to be published in the vernacular. Close contact with Europe began a century of the application of Western literary modes to Russian materials.

Prince Antioch Kantemir (1708-44) blended European neoclassicism with portraiture of Russian life and wrote poetry in the syllabic system common to French and Polish. Poetry in tonic form, more suitable to Russian, was written by V. K. Tredyakovsky and was brought to a brilliant level by M. V. Lomonosov. A. P. Sumarokov, the founder of Russian drama, combined European forms and Russian themes in his fables and plays.

The literature of the reign of Catherine II revealed the influence of the European Enlightenment. Catherine's own dramas compounded classical style and satirical tone, as did the journals of N. I. Novikov and the grandiose odes of G. R. Derzavhin. Satire was combined with realistic motifs in the plays of D. I. Fonzivin (1745-92), author of Russia's first truly national drama, The Minor (produced 1782), and in the fables of I. I. Khemnitser. Near the end of the century the beginning of political radicalism was given expression in tandem with Rousseauean sentimentalism by A. N. Radishchev. Sentimentality was developed by Vladislav Ozerov (1769-1816) in the drama and found its principal prose exponent in Nikolai Karamzin, who also initiated the Russian short story.

Romanticism and Modern Style: The Early Nineteenth Century

V. A. Zhukovsky introduced European romantic idealism into Russian poetry. Increasing interest in national characteristics was expressed in the fables of I. A. Krylov, and literary nationalism rose to a high pitch during the wars against Napoleon I. In the 1820s a modern Russian literary style, realistic and nationally conscious, if to some degree shaded by romanticism and by European influence, was advanced by the versatile Aleksandr Pushkin, generally considered the greatest of Russian poets. M. Y. Lermontov's poetry maintained this stylistic excellence for a brief time. The despair detailed in the works of the romantic poet and novelist Yevgeny Baratinsky reflects the repressive atmosphere that existed under Czar Nicholas I.

In the 1830s cultural schism was manifested in the conflict between Slavophiles and Westernizers; the leader of the Westernizers, the critic V. G. Belinsky, stressed the importance of literature's relationship to national life, thus furthering the development of Russian literary realism. Nikolai Gogol, considered the primary initiator of realistic prose, also revealed aspects of romantic and morbid fantasy in his satirical and humanitarian tales. At mid-century a merciless realism, not devoid of humor, was developed by I. A. Goncharov, while A. N. Ostrovsky, who first made the merchant world a subject of Russian literary works, wrote a vast number of plays, most of which are no longer performed. The poetry of F. I. Tyuchev conferred philosophic significance upon everyday events. N. A. Nekrasov created verses of social purpose.

An Age of Masterpieces: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The works of Russia's golden age of prose literature were written against a background of czarist autocracy. Falling generally within the realist framework, the masterworks of this era exhibit a strong bent toward mysticism, brooding introspection, and melodrama. I. S. Turgenev achieved world stature with sophisticated novels that were profoundly critical of Russian society. Great critical and popular acclaim were bestowed upon the tormented genius and moral and religious idealism expressed in the works of Feodor Dostoyevsky, and upon the monumental, socially penetrating novels of Leo Tolstoy; these two authors stand among the giants of world literature. With the brilliantly sensitive stories and plays of Anton Chekhov the golden age essentially came to a close, passing into a time noted for poetic works.

A reaction against realism manifested itself in the rise of symbolism, which flourished from the 1890s to about 1910 in the works of Feodor Sologub, V. K. Brynsov, I. F. Annensky, Andrei Bely, A. A. Blok, K. D. Balmont, and A. M. Remizov. The reaction was also evident in the religious and philosophical works of Vladimir Soloviev and in the historical novels of D. S. Merezhkovsky.

In 1912 the Acmeist school, led by N. S. Gumilev and S. M. Gorodetsky, proclaimed a return to more concrete poetic imagery. The poets Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova belonged to this group also. In fiction the outstanding figures included V. M. Garshin and V. G. Korolenko. Maxim Gorky dominated fictional literature just prior to the Revolution of 1917. His passionate realism was echoed in the stories and dramas of his disciple Leonid Andreyev, while Ivan Bunin, also a member of Gorky's circle, wrote in a more conservative realistic vein.

Soviet Literature, 1917-39

After the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution (1917), many writers emigrated and were active abroad (Bunin, Kuprin, Merezhkovsky, Aldanov, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others). Some writers remained in Russia but published no new works; others became Communists; some adapted their talents to the needs of the new system while remaining partly aloof from its doctrines. Literary forms developed under the Bolshevik regime were at first similar to those appearing in Western Europe at the same time. In the first period after the revolution (to 1921) poetry flourished; principal figures included the symbolist Blok, the imagist S. A. Yesenin, and the iconoclast V. V. Mayakovsky. The older novelist Boris Pilnyak chronicled the new scene, and Isaac Babel wrote colorful short stories.

In the era of the New Economic Policy (1922-28) there was much debate over literary dictatorship, with the "On Guard" group arguing for it and the Mayakovsky group against it. The Serapion Brothers (a group including K. A. Fedin, M. M. Zoshchenko, Vsevolod Ivanov, V. A. Kaverin, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Lev Lunts) proclaimed their credo of artistic independence, and the formalists emphasized the structure of a poem rather than its content. This period saw the rebirth of the novel in the satirical works of Ilya Ilf and Y. P. Petrov and in the psychological and romantic novels of L. M. Leonov, Yuri Olesha, and Kaverin. M. A. Sholokhov gave the revolution-oriented novel an epic breadth, and in 1928 Gorky returned to enormous popularity.

A general dissolution of the various literary groups took place from 1929 to 1932, and there was a marked trend toward political mobilization of writers. This trend was strengthened in the 1930s during Stalin's purges of the intelligentsia, and socialist realism was proclaimed as the guiding principle in all writing. In the drama, a form greatly encouraged and widely used as a means of propaganda, outstanding figures since the revolution include Yevgeny Schvartz, Nikolai Erdman, M. A. Bulgakov, S. M. Tretyakov, V. P. Katayev, V. M. Kirshon, A. N. Afinogenov, and Alexei Arbuzov. Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Tikhonov became the leading poets, and the novels of Ostrovsky, Aleksey Tolstoy, and Ilya Ehrenburg were widely read. V. B. Shklovski gained great influence as a critic.

World War II to the Present

During World War II, Ehrenburg and Simonov were outstanding reporters. The spirit of friendliness toward the West ended abruptly in 1946 with a campaign initiated by Andrei Zhdanov, a Communist party secretary. Cultural isolationism and rigid party dictatorship of literature were enforced, and the effects on literature were disastrous.

After the death of Stalin in 1953 some writers, previously in disgrace, were returned to favor; those still living were again permitted to publish. Ehrenburg's celebrated novel The Thaw (1954) described the despair of authors condemned to write in accordance with official doctrines. During this period cultural exchange with foreign countries was encouraged. In opposition to patriotic propaganda from orthodox party spokesmen, literature critical of Soviet society was, for a time, warmly received. Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko were widely acclaimed for their nonconformist poetry. Voznesensky was praised for remarkable innovation in poetic form and use of language. Among Yevtushenko's most admired works is Babi Yar, an eloquent protest against Soviet anti-Semitism.

In 1963 the government and the Union of Soviet Writers issued severe reprimands to these and other dissident writers. Pasternak's epic novel Doctor Zhivago (1957), published and received with critical accolades throughout the Western world, was refused publication in the USSR, and the author was compelled by official pressure to decline the Nobel Prize.

After Khrushchev's fall from grace in 1964, the struggle to liberate Soviet writing from political control intensified. Famous writers such as Voznesensky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn publicly asked for an end to government censorship. Others, including Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel, were imprisoned for permitting pseudonymous foreign publication of works critical of the Soviet regime. Solzhenitsyn's first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), described life in a concentration camp; its anti-Stalinism was in line with the political climate of 1962. His subsequent works earned him exile from Russia in 1974.

The 1980s saw new religious, even mystical, trends, as in the stories of Tatyana Tolstaya. After the fall of the Soviet regime, Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland in 1994, twenty years after he had gone into exile. Meanwhile, younger writers reflected the changed milieu of post-Communist Russia in their pursuit of more personal and less political themes in their prose and poetry.

Starting with the Chronicle, a movement gained force to emphasize the Latin as opposed to the Slavic elements in Romanian culture. The mainspring of this movement was Ion Eliade (1802-72), known as Radulescu, and its outcome was a dictionary of the Romanian language produced (1871-76) by August Laurianu et al., in which all words of non-Latin origin were eliminated. In 1860 Latin replaced Cyrillic as the official Romanian alphabet (the church used the Cyrillic until 1890); 1860 thus marks the beginning of modern Romanian literature.

Vasile Alecsandri's ballad Little Lamb (1852) marked a first effort to counteract the strong French influence on Romanian literature. Drama gained importance in the time of Eliade and George Asachi (1788-1869), cofounders (1833-36) of the Romanian national theater. Other outstanding names in drama are Ion Luca Caragiale, a master of the comedy of manners; Ronetti Roman (1853-1908), author of the tragedy Manasse (1900), dealing with the conflict of Jews and Christians in Romania; Victor Eftimiu, who experimented with poetic drama; and Lucian Blaga.

Poetry flourished after Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917) founded (1867) the cosmopolitan journal Convorbiri literare [literary conversations] at Jassy in Moldavia, and soon began to publish the lyrics of Mihail Eminescu. The peasant and folk traditions were collected and preserved by the historian Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940). In poetry this school produced George Cosbuc (1866-1918) and in prose Ion Slavici (1848-1945), who collected native tales, and Ion Creanga (1837-89), a pioneer in the field of the novel.

Themes of social concern were treated by Alexandru Vlahuta (1858-1919) in the novel Dan (1894) and by Duiliu Zamfirescu (1858-1922) in Country Life (1894). The contrast between rural and urban life was detailed in the realistic novels Dinu Millian by Constantin Mille and Parasites (1893) by Barbu Delavrancea (1858-1919). From the "back to the soil" movement in Romanian letters came the novel Ion (1920) by Liviu Rebreanu, known also for his novel of World War I, The Forest of the Hanged (1922). Major Romanian poets of the 20th cent. include Dimitrie Anghel (1872-1914) and Octavian Goga (1881-1938), an outspoken and often partisan advocate of Transylvania.

Under the Ceauşescu regime (1965-89), postwar Romanian writing reflected a strong Communist influence. Nevertheless, after 1968 an independent movement emerged, subjected to great pressure in the years before Ceauşescu's overthrow. Along with the exiled writers Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco, and Emil Cioran, the novelist Mihail Sadoveanu and the poets Tudor Arghezi and Mihai Beniuc are the most notable modern Romanian literary figures. Some significant younger writers are the novelists Zaharia Stancu, Marin Preda, Titus Popovici, and Norman Manea and the poets Veronica Porumbacu, Alexandu Jar, and Maria Banusi.

Early Works

Literature in the Portuguese language first emerged in lyric poetry, the courtly love poems collected in cancioneiros [song books]. The earliest of these, three in number, are the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, da Vaticana, and Colocci-Brancuti, written in the 13th cent. In the early 20th cent. the scholarly work of Carolina Micaëlis de Vasconcelos on the Cancioneiro da Ajuda opened large vistas into the past of Portuguese literature. The early poems were greatly influenced by the Provençal language and literature, but they had the individual flavor and meter of Portuguese and Galician, then a dialect of Portuguese (see Provençal literature). King Dinis, who ruled Portugal in the late 13th and early 14th cent., was an accomplished poet and, like his father, Alfonso III, followed the Provençal custom of encouraging poetic activity in his court.

Prose writing took longer to develop. Religious and historical writings ultimately led to the romances of chivalry, the progenitor of which, Amadis of Gaul, most likely originated in Portugal. Among the greatest achievements of medieval Portuguese prose are the vivid and well-documented chronicles written by Fernão Lopes (c.1380-c.1460) and Gomes Eanes de Zurara (c.1420-c.1474). Portuguese poetry in the 15th cent. was marked by the influence of Spain, which can be seen in Garcia de Resende's collection, Cancioneiro geral (1516).

The Renaissance through the Seventeenth Century

The impact of the Renaissance in Portugal was particularly strong in poetry and drama. The plays of Gil Vicente, who wrote in both Portuguese and Spanish, are infused with the Renaissance spirit, particularly the ideals of humanism. The Italianate school strongly influenced 16th-century Portuguese poetry. The humanist Francisco de Sá de Miranda introduced new poetic forms upon his return from Italy. He, Diogo Bernardes, and others mastered the new forms of lyric poetry, which reached their highest point in the works of Luis de Camões. Camões, known for his national epic Os Lusídas [the Portuguese] (1572), was also the author of a superb body of lyric poems. Sá de Miranda and his followers also introduced the prose comedy and tragedy into Portugal.

The Renaissance saw a spate of writing by historians who chronicled the discoveries and conquests in Africa, Asia, and America. João de Barros ranks among the best of these. The Portuguese Bernardim Ribeiro's pastoral novel Menina e Moça [the book of the young girl] (1554) was certainly the inspiration in part for the Spanish Jorge de Montemayor's Diana (1559), one of the most important novels in Spanish literature. The leading figures of the 17th cent. were the poet Francisco Rodrigues Lobo (1580-1622) and the prose writer Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608-66), whose writings stand out in a century mainly marked by subservience to Spanish form and style, especially Gongorism.

Literary Movements of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The 18th cent. developed gradually into the literary revolution that was the romantic movement (see romanticism). Liberal ideas from abroad invaded every branch of letters and learning. João B. de Almeida Garrett, the chief exponent of French-inspired romanticism, exercised great influence over a generation of poets, playwrights, and novelists. Through his historical novels, a history of Portugal, and numerous pamphlets and journalistic endeavors, Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho e Araújo provided substantial support for the romantic, liberal, and anticlerical movements that helped shape Portuguese culture and politics in the 19th cent.

A group of dissident poets, including Antero de Quental, Téofilo Braga, and Abílio Manuel Guerra Junqueiro, revolted against romanticism and laced their works with philosophical and social ideas. José Maria Eça de Queiroz introduced realism into the novel and set the tone for the next half century. Historiography, of a more narrative than scientific sort, flourished at the same time. Joaquim P. de Oliveira Martins was one of the more popular writers of this genre.

The Twentieth Century

The modern period in Portuguese letters dates from the establishment of the republic in 1910. Various writers fostered suadosismo, a cult of nostalgia and regret over an unrecoverable and mythic past. Later writing became more sensitive to developments in other countries. Fernando Pessoa, largely unrecognized during his lifetime, would be acclaimed later as the greatest modern Portuguese poet, and José Régio distinguished himself as a poet and playwright. The novel was cultivated by Aquilino Ribeiro, J. M. Ferreira de Castro, Alves Redol, Fernando Namora, Agustina Bessa Luís, and others.

In the early 1970s Portuguese literary circles were shaken by the publication of a volume of collected notes, stories, letters, and poems by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa. Banned because of its erotic and feminist nature, the book was allowed to circulate after the collapse of the Salazar dictatorship in Apr., 1974. In the United States the book was published as The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters (1975).

Reflecting the influence of French literary theory, Portuguese literature since 1974 has often focused on the linguistic and technical aspects of narrative. Important contemporary novelists include José Cardosa-Piresa, Olga Gonçalves, Lídia Jorge, António Lobo Antunes, and José Saramago, who is internationally recognized as one of the great modern writers of fiction (he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998). Important poets include Eugénio de Andrade and António Ramos Rosa.

The late 20th cent. has also seen the rise of Portuguese literature in Africa: in Angola, the poet Agostinho Neto and the novelist Luadino Vieira; in Mozambique, the novelist Luís Bernardo Howana; in Cape Verde, the novelists Manuel Lopes, Orlanda Amarilis, and Manuel Ferreira.

Early History

The early literature of Poland was written in Latin: its chief figures included the historians Martin Gallus (12th cent.) and Jan Dlugosz (1415-80), the astronomer Copernicus, and the poet Klemens Janitius (1516-43). The first book printed in Poland was issued in Wrocław in 1475.

The Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Under the impact of humanism, religious reform, and the increasing sophistication of the gentry, the 16th cent. became the golden age of Polish literature. Mikolaj Rej (1505-69) is considered the father of Polish literature; other writers of this period are the great poet Jan Kochanowski; the humanitarian Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (1503-72); Piotr Skarga (1536-1612), a spokesman for the Counter Reformation; the historian Martin Bielski; and the political writer Stanislaus Orzechowski (1513-66).

After the mid-18th cent. there was a revival of classicism and a new flowering of the arts influenced by the Enlightenment. Modern Polish journalism was born, and light drama flourished under the playwrights Wojciech Bogusławski (1757-1829) and Franciszek Zablocki (1754-1821). Ignacy Krasicki wrote satire and fables. A disciple of Voltaire, Julian Niemcewicz, bridged the classical and romantic periods in Polish literature.

The Nineteenth Century

The romantic era, with its revolutionary and reform movements, was one of extraordinary productivity. Themes of nationalism and freedom predominated, developed by the patriotic poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński. Romantic novelists of note were Jozef Korzeniowski (1797-1863) and Henryk Rzewuski (1791-1866), and the major dramatist was Alexander Fredro (1793-1876). In the 19th cent. much Polish literature was written by émigrés in Paris and other European centers; these included the poet Cyprjan Norwid (1821-83).

Positivism, stimulated by the revolutionary fiasco of 1863, marked an effort to gain national strength through literary attacks on ignorance and reaction. A notable representative of this school was Bolesław Prus. The colorful historical novels of the Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz gained international popularity at this time. The last decade of the 19th cent. saw the appearance of the neoromantic school of Young Poland, influenced by French poetry and by Nietzsche. The poet and dramatist Stanisław Wyspiański, the novelists and dramatists Stefan Żeromski and Stanisław Przybyszewski, and the novelist Władisław Stanisław Reymont were the outstanding writers of this period.

The Twentieth Century

The regaining of Polish independence in 1919 after generations of partition inspired new literary activity. The Skamander group of urban poets, including Julian Tuwim and Kazimierz Wierzyński, called for an end to nationalist preoccupation and for experimental freedom; other significant figures included the novelists Marja Dąbrowska and Zofia Nalkowska (1885-1954) and the dramatists Karol Hubert Rostworoski (1877-1938) and Jerzy Szaniawski. The period's greatest writing, which gained recognition only after World War II, was the prose and drama of Stanisław Witkiewisz, Witold Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz. Notable postwar writers who focused on the anguish of the period include Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Putrament, Leon Kruczkowski, and the great expatriate Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981.

The advent of the Communist regime was accompanied by themes of socialist realism. Communist writers include the poet Constantine Galcyzynski (1906-53) and the novelists Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski and Kazimierz Brandys. In 1956 writers joined in the popular uprising against the Moscow-dominated regime, and subsequently there was some relaxation of literary strictures. The thaw (culminating in the rise of the "Solidarity" movement, the state of emergency, and the collapse of Communism) resulted in renewed contact with the West and a surge of literary experimentation. Many novelists continued to explore themes related to the war experience and its aftermath; others wrote works of psychological and political realism, reflecting current European trends.

Among the foremost postwar novelists are Wilhelm Mach, Leopold Buczkowski, Roman Bratny, Bohdan Czeszko, Julian Stryjkowski, Stanisław Dygat, Stanisław Lem, and Sławomir Mrożek, also well known for his plays and short stories. Postwar poetry in Poland deals principally with philosophical concerns. The chief poets of the era include Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Różewicz, and Wisława Szymborska (awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996). The works of Miron Białoszewsky, Jerzy Harasymowicz, and Stanisław Grochowiak are in a more lyrical vein. Notable among the writers who began as members of the Polish New Wave movement of the late 1960s is the expatriate poet and novelist Adam Zagajewski. Principal essayists and critics include Tadeusz Breza, Artur Sandauer, Jan Kott, and Jan Błoński.

Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Literature

Pre-Islamic Persian literature consists of religious texts, the most notable of which is the Avesta, a collection of liturgic fragments, and the later Pahlavi writing of the Sassanid period. The Islamic conquest of Iran in the 7th cent. was accompanied by a linguistic infusion: one century later, approximately 50% of the Persian literary lexicon consisted of Arabic terms. As Islam became the dominant theme, Arabic became the literary language, until the emergence of local dynasties in the 10th cent. (see Arabic literature). The first extant Islamic Persian poetry dates to the Samanid state (874-999); the first famous representative of this literature was the poet Rudaki (d. 940 or 944). To Rudaki are attributed a lost mathnawi (epic poem with rhyming couplets) version of the fables of the kalila wa dimna as well as a few qasidahs (panegyrics). Other major figures of this period are Abu Shukur of Balkh, who is credited with the introduction of rubaiyyat, Persian poetic quatrains; Daqiqi, a Samanid court poet and a precursor of Firdawsi; and Baba Tahir Uryan, author of rubaiyyat expressive of pain.

Literary Flowering and the Golden Age

The first group of major Persian poets gathered in the court of Mahmud of Ghazna and included Unsuri (d. 1040 or 1049), Farrukhi (d. 1038), Minuchihri (d. 1041), Asadi (d. c.1030/1041), and Firdausi. The first four wrote Diwans (collections of poetry that included qasidas, long poems dealing with pre-established themes, such as spring, or long-lost loves). Asadi was a pioneer of the munazara genre—staged disputations between opposing characters or concepts. The major Persian national epic, the Shah-nama, the Book of Kings, was written by Firdawsi to celebrate the mythic pre-Islamic history of Iran, in a style that attempted to exclude usages and expressions of Arabic origin.

This formative period of Persian literature also witnessed the modest beginnings of Persian prose and the establishment of rubaiyyat and mathnawi as classical literary genres. The travelogue of Nasir-i Khusraw (d. 1088), Safar-nama, in which he relates his pilgrimage to Mecca and his travels in Syria, Egypt, and Arabia, represents the maturation of Persian prose. One of the masters of rubaiyyat was Omar Khayyam, whose reputation in the West is largely due to Edward FitzGerald's nonliteral adaptation of his quatrains. Khayyam's poetry belongs to the mystical and didactic genres that were developed by Sanai in his Hadiqat al-Haqiqa, Garden of the Truth, and that found their culmination in the work of Farid ad-Din Attar. The 11th cent. also witnessed the blossoming of the great romantic epics in Persian under masters such as Nizami (d. c.1209), who is famous for his Khamseh or quintet.

Panegyric poetry developed in the Ghaznavid court with Masud bin Sad (d. 1131), and in the Seljuq court with Azraqi (d. c.1130) and Amir Muizzi (d. 1147). The most prominent of panegyric poets were, however, Anwari (d. c.1190), court poet of prince Sanjar of Balkh, and Khaqani (d. 1199), whose poetry is reputed for its complexity. Both the political treatise Siyasat-nama of Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092), and the ethical didactic work Qabus-nama of the Ziyarid prince Kay Kaus are representative of the more colorful style of rejuvenated Persian prose. A most important work in prose was the Chahar Maqala, Four Treatises, by Nizami Arudi (d. 1174) of Samarkand, which discusses the crafts of scribes, poets, astrologers, and astronomers.

At the heart of the Golden Age of Persian literature were the mystic and didactic works of Sadi and Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Also worth noting are Iraqi (d. c.1288), author of the Lamaat, a mystic compendium of prose and poetry with pantheistic inclinations, and Amir Khusraw (1253-1324), a Persian-speaking Indian poet. The culmination of the Golden Age comes with the work of the poet Hafiz. While mysticism was the dominant strain of Persian poetry, Persian learning was emerging in philosophical, historical, and scientific writings. Persian also began to be used as a scholarly and court language in India, which subsequently attracted many immigrant Persian poets. The prominent scholars of the era include Nasir ad-Din Tusi (d. 1274), Juwayni (d. 1283), Rashid ad-Din fadl Allah (d. 1318), and Mustawfi (d. 1349).

The Silver Age and Later Works

The 15th cent. period of the second Turko-Tartar invasion and the establishment of the Timurid dynasty is considered the Silver Age, or the last episode, of classical Persian literature. This period is characterized by imitations of and commentaries on the works of the Golden Age. Among the notable literary figures were Jami, Saib of Tabriz (d. 1677), Mirza Bedil (d. 1720), an Indian writer who achieved great renown in Afghanistan and central Asia, and Ali Hazin (d. 1766), who was exiled to India. The religious and political turmoil of the 19th cent., together with the model set by European literature, led to substantial changes in form and content. Nationalist and social themes were introduced, while classical genres were reformed and challenged. Modern poets include Iradj, Abid e-Pishawari, Parwin, and Nima. Recent Persian experimentation in fiction includes that of S. Hedayet and M. M. Hejazi.

The Norwegians who settled Iceland late in the 9th cent. brought with them a body of oral mythological poetry that flourished there in a sturdy, seafaring world removed from the warring mainland. The first great period, which lasted until c.1100, was oral, as writing was not introduced until well after the establishment of Christianity (c.1000). From c.1100 to c.1350 both the oral poetry and new compositions were set down. The conscious, clear prose style that developed for both saga and history antedates that of all other modern European literatures except Gaelic. In the later 13th cent., with Iceland's loss of independence to Norway, literary activity declined and had virtually disappeared a century later.

The surviving body of literature can best be discussed as consisting of several types. Eddic writings (see Edda) were condensations of ancient lays, in alliterative verse (see alliteration), on old gods and heroes. Many of the heroic lays involve the legend of Siegfried and Brunhild; the mythological lays, focusing on Norse gods, include "The Lay of Thrym," a narrative about Thor, and "The Seeress' Prophecy," which begins with creation and anticipates the gods' demise.

Also composed in alliterative verse, but more complex and artificial in form, was scaldic poetry, which flourished in Norway about the 10th cent. and reached its height slightly later in Iceland. Comprising poems of praise, triumph, lamentation, and love, it is subjective in approach and highly mannered in technique. Intricate metrical schemes are meticulously observed, and diction is polished to the point of preciousness, especially in the incessant use of the kenning (a metaphoric substituted phrase, e.g., "ship-road" for "sea"), found also in Anglo-Saxon literature. As the scalds became a group apart, and only the initiated could understand their highly allusive verse, Snorri Sturluson was prompted to write the Prose Edda (c.1222) as a text of scaldic poetry, in a vain attempt to promote and preserve the old techniques.

As scaldic poetry declined, new forms rose to replace it, among them the ballad and the sacred hymn. A new rhymed verse developed, somewhat analogous to that in Middle English literature and used for much the same purpose—translation and paraphrase of foreign romances. The bulk of medieval Norse literature, and the most readable today, survives in the form of sagas, that is, prose narratives, sometimes interspersed with verse, which relate the lives of legendary or historical figures with objectivity and skillful characterization and which reflect the old Icelandic devotion to personal honor and family.

Historical writing of the 11th and 12th cent. is also noteworthy. In this field Snorri Sturluson contributed his Heimskringla. Ari Thorgilsson produced Islendingabók (c.1125), an account of the island's history, an abridged version of which has survived. He was probably partly responsible also for the Landnámabók, a topographical and genealogical account of Iceland; other works by Thorgilsson have been lost. Finally, all the Scandinavian countries produced medieval ballads, but these were not written down until much later. There remain numerous unsolved problems concerning oral composition, transmission of origins and influences, and dating.

Norwegian independence from Denmark, gained in 1814, was a vital stimulus to literature. The mutual antagonism of the literary figures Henrik Wergeland and J. S. Welhaven introduced a literary struggle between the national and the cosmopolitan. The folk collections of Jørgen Moe and P. C. Asbjørnsen recreated a cultural tradition, and by 1850 Ivar Aasen had developed the landsmål language to replace bokmål (Dano-Norwegian); it linked peasant dialects and the tongue of the sagas to contemporary literature. National romanticism reigned at mid-century, but the novels of Camilla Collett foreshadowed the great realist movement.

By the 1870s, the realist plays of Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had won international recognition. Chief novelists of the realist and naturalist schools were Amalie Skram, Jonas Lie, Alexander Kielland, and Arne Garborg. The neo-romantic movement of the 1890s called forth the imaginative brilliance of Knut Hamsun, the psychologically oriented novels of Hans Kinck (1865-1926), and the lyric verse of Nils Vogt. Idealism marked the social dramas of Gunnar Heiberg.

Many different themes and styles prevailed in the era after World War I. Johan Bojer, Peter Egge (1869-1959), Cora Sandel, and Olav Duun wrote novels of Norwegian life, and the Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset gained stature for her novels of ethics and religion. Radical credos were expressed in the plays of Hilge Krog (1889-1962) and poems of Arnulf Øverland. Sigurd Hoel gained acclaim as an outstanding satirist, Herman Wildenvey as a lighthanded lyricist. The hopes and fears of the times were reflected in the verse and drama of Nordahl Grieg (1902-43).

Few significant books were published during World War II. The war experience and postwar anxieties were explored in the experimental work of Kåre Holt and Aksel Sandemose, in the poetry of Claes Gill and Jan-Magnus Bruheimin, and in the novels of Odd Bang-Hansen and Tarjei Vesaas, who had already established his reputation by the 1930s. Johan Borgen (1902-79) was Norway's leading novelist in the 1960s and 70s. Other leading novelists of the late 20th cent. include Terje Stigen and Axel Jensen; Bjørg Vik is noted for her short stories.

Background

The Norman conquest of England in 1066 traditionally signifies the beginning of 200 years of the domination of French in English letters. French cultural dominance, moreover, was general in Europe at this time. French language and culture replaced English in polite court society and had lasting effects on English culture. But the native tradition survived, although little 13th-century, and even less 12th-century, vernacular literature is extant, since most of it was transmitted orally. Anglo-Saxon fragmented into several dialects and gradually evolved into Middle English, which, despite an admixture of French, is unquestionably English. By the mid-14th cent., Middle English had become the literary as well as the spoken language of England.

The Early Period

Several poems in early Middle English are extant. The Orrmulum (c.1200), a verse translation of parts of the Gospels, is of linguistic and prosodic rather than literary interest. Of approximately the same date, The Owl and the Nightingale (see separate article) is the first example in English of the débat, a popular continental form; in the poem, the owl, strictly monastic and didactic, and the nightingale, a free and amorous secular spirit, charmingly debate the virtues of their respective ways of life.

The Thirteenth Century

Middle English prose of the 13th cent. continued in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon prose—homiletic, didactic, and directed toward ordinary people rather than polite society. The "Katherine Group" (c.1200), comprising three saints' lives, is typical. The Ancren Riwle (c.1200) is a manual for prospective anchoresses; it was very popular, and it greatly influenced the prose of the 13th and 14th cent. The fact that there was no French prose tradition was very important to the preservation of the English prose tradition.

In the 13th cent. the romance, an important continental narrative verse form, was introduced in England. It drew from three rich sources of character and adventure: the legends of Charlemagne, the legends of ancient Greece and Rome, and the British legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Layamon's Brut, a late 13th-century metrical romance (a translation from the French), marks the first appearance of Arthurian matter in English (see Arthurian legend). Original English romances based upon indigenous material include King Horn and Havelok the Dane, both 13th-century works that retain elements of the Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition.

However, French romances, notably the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, were far more influential than their English counterparts. In England French romances popularized ideas of adventure and heroism quite contrary to those of Anglo-Saxon heroic literature and were representative of wholly different values and tastes. Ideals of courtly love, together with its elaborate manners and rituals, replaced those of the heroic code; adventure and feats of courage were pursued for the sake of the knight's lady rather than for the sake of the hero's honor or the glory of his tribal king.

Continental verse forms based on metrics and rhyme replaced the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line in Middle English poetry (with the important exception of the 14th-century alliterative revival). Many French literary forms also became popular, among them the fabliau; the exemplum, or moral tale; the animal fable; and the dream vision. The continental allegorical tradition, which derived from classical literature, is exemplified by the Roman de la Rose, which had a strong impact on English literature.

Medieval works of literature often center on a popular rhetorical figure, such as the ubi sunt, which remarks on the inevitability—and sadness—of change, loss, and death; and the cursor mundi, which harps on the vanity of human grandeur. A 15,000-line 13th-century English poem, the Cursor Mundi, retells human history (i.e., the medieval version—biblical plus classical story) from the point of view its title implies.

A number of 13th-century secular and religious Middle English lyrics are extant, including the exuberant Sumer Is Icumen In, but like Middle English literature in general, the lyric reached its fullest flower during the second half of the 14th cent. Lyrics continued popular in the 15th cent., from which time the ballad also dates.

The Fourteenth Century

The poetry of the alliterative revival (see alliteration), the unexplained reemergence of the Anglo-Saxon verse form in the 14th cent., includes some of the best poetry in Middle English. The Christian allegory The Pearl (see separate article) is a poem of great intricacy and sensibility that is meaningful on several symbolic levels. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by the same anonymous author, is also of high literary sophistication, and its intelligence, vividness, and symbolic interest render it possibly the finest Arthurian poem in English. Other important alliterative poems are the moral allegory Piers Plowman, attributed to William Langland, and the alliterative Morte Arthur, which, like nearly all English poetry until the mid-14th cent., was anonymous.

The works of Geoffrey Chaucer mark the brilliant culmination of Middle English literature. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales are stories told each other by pilgrims—who comprise a very colorful cross section of 14th-century English society—on their way to the shrine at Canterbury. The tales are cast into many different verse forms and genres and collectively explore virtually every significant medieval theme. Chaucer's wise and humane work also illuminates the full scope of medieval thought. Overshadowed by Chaucer but of some note are the works of John Gower.

The Fifteenth Century

The 15th cent. is not distinguished in English letters, due in part to the social dislocation caused by the prolonged Wars of the Roses. Of the many 15th-century imitators of Chaucer the best-known are John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Other poets of the time include Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barclay and the Scots poets William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, and Gawin Douglas. The poetry of John Skelton, which is mostly satiric, combines medieval and Renaissance elements.

William Caxton introduced printing to England in 1475 and in 1485 printed Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. This prose work, written in the twilight of chivalry, casts the Arthurian tales into coherent form and views them with an awareness that they represent a vanishing way of life. The miracle play, a long cycle of short plays based upon biblical episodes, was popular throughout the Middle Ages in England. The morality play, an allegorical drama centering on the struggle for man's soul, originated in the 15th cent. The finest of the genre is Everyman.

The Decline of Rome

With the slow dissolution over centuries of the Roman Empire in the West, Latin writing dwindled and changed like the rest of Roman culture. It was formerly conventional to say that in the 6th cent. the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius was the last great work of classical Latin and that Boethius' younger contemporary Cassiodorus was the first notable figure of medieval literature (though he wrote in classical form). However, the transition was, in fact, so gradual as to be imperceptible.

One of the main characteristics of the emerging literature was the fundamentally Christian tone; the other was the use of a simpler and more flexible Latin, which drew from the common speech of Rome and the provinces. The Christian tradition had already been firmly established by early Christian writers—St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine—using exact classical language. Notable poets wrote Christian hymns, which, when joined to music and shaped to new poetry with accentual rhythm and rhyme unknown to the classics, became one of the glories of medieval literature.

The Monastic Tradition

From the 6th cent. on, learning was preserved mostly in the monasteries (see monasticism), and almost all writers were clergymen. The Latin used in the Church services, based on the simplified language, was therefore preserved long after all Latin was replaced in common speech by the vernacular tongues. The bulk of prose writing was given over to theological treatises, homilies, sermons, pastoral instructions, and devotional works. Some of it is of great force and beauty, as in writings of St. Gregory the Great (Pope Gregory I).

Sporadic efforts were made to revive classical learning, but these were successful only in promoting learning in general and establishing educational standards. By far the most important was the Carolingian revival in the late 8th and early 9th cent. Charlemagne persuaded an Englishman, Alcuin, to establish a court school. The writers, such as Einhard, were medieval rather than classical in spirit, but the effects of the revival were lasting. The effects of the movement can be found in works of the writers Paul the Deacon, Rabanus Maurus Magnentius, and John Scotus Erigena; the poets Walafrid Strabo and Gottschalk, and Waltharius; and the dramatist Hrotswith von Bandersheim.

Abelard, outstanding theologian and competent poet, was primarily a schoolman and his school was the precursor of the Univ. of Paris, one of the great medieval universities (see colleges and universities). St. Bernard of Clairvaux, vigorous opponent of Abelard, is usually considered one of the greatest of medieval writers. Perhaps more renowned as a theologian than Bernard was the learned St. Anselm, and certainly more vociferous in polemics was Hugh of St. Victor.

Among the mystical writers Richard of St. Victor is ranked by many as a peer of St. Bernard. The volume of writing was steadily growing and was of truly universal Western authorship. Secular poetry and prose were being composed for sheer enjoyment. Chroniclers and historians were found in all lands—Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Matthew Paris, Walter Map, Suger, and William of Tyre are examples—and many monasteries had completely anonymous chronicles such as those of St. Gall.

The Flowering of Medieval Culture

The quality of writing and of scholarship was steadily rising, and the way was being prepared for the great flowering of medieval culture in the 13th cent. Most notable was the full development of scholasticism by St. Bonaventure, St. Albertus Magnus, and St. Thomas Aquinas, together with Duns Scotus, William of Occam, and others. The simple Latin dialogues on the mysteries of Christ's life had become the miracle play.

Secular poetry had since the 11th cent. given rise to well-wrought and exquisitely rhymed lyrics and satires commonly called the Goliardic songs. The type of encyclopedic compendium popular since St. Isidore of Seville's 7th-century Etymologiae was represented by the work of Vincent of Beauvais. The lives of saints were collected in The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine. Other genres were also represented in Latin: the mock epic, the fabliau, the romance, the beast tale, the folk story.

The Decline of Medieval Latin

Many literary genres were already being taken over by writing in the vernacular, which had begun in the 10th cent. This advance of the dialects, which were already being formed into the modern European languages, doomed the older "learned" literature. Meanwhile the revival of classical learning and the scholarship of the Renaissance moved to undermine Medieval Latin literature. Dante's precise Latin writing could scarcely be called medieval in its form, and the humanists with their Ciceronian prose and Vergilian eclogues were setting out to destroy, not to reform, Medieval Latin. Except for the persistence of Church Latin, they succeeded.

Very little remains of the ritualistic songs and the native poetry of the Romans and Latins before the rise of a literature. The history of the Roman Empire is fundamental to the fabric of this literature: in the first three centuries of its development, the influence of captive Greece was all-pervasive.

The Development of a Classical Style

The close of the First Punic War (c.240 B.C.) marks the beginning of literary work in Rome with the plays of the slave Livius Andronicus, adapted from the Greek. The epic poet Gnaeus Naevius also wrote dramas, but he was far surpassed by the greatest of Roman dramatists, Plautus, a master of comedy. In his Satires Ennius introduced the hexameter into Latin; Cato the Elder opposed the hellenizing group, to which Ennius belonged, and wrote his works in as rude a Latin as possible. However, his efforts had little effect and the works of Terence, Greek in scene and origin, manifest the tremendous interchange of Greek and Latin writing.

The 1st cent. B.C., the last era of the Roman republic, produced some of the greatest figures in Latin literature—the encyclopedist Varro, the statesmen and prose masters Cicero and Julius Caesar, the poets Lucretius and Catullus, and the historian Sallust. Vergil, the greatest of Latin epic poets, exemplifies a new atmosphere in the Augustan age, with his celebration—and somber questioning—of the new empire. In his epodes, odes, and satires, the poet Horace brought the Latin lyric to perfection, while the elegy was cultivated by Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. The notable historian of the age was Livy.

Post-classical Literature

During the first half of the 1st cent. A.D., Latin literature in its classical form was in decline. The works of Seneca, Lucan, Persius, and Statius typify a period in which the masters, both Latin and Greek, were imitated. Among the most original poets were Martial and Juvenal, celebrated for their satiric writings. Petronius, Frontinus, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger (see under Pliny the Elder), and Tacitus were the chief writers of prose; Suetonius exemplified the richness of historical and biographical writing under the Principate, while Quintilian brought classical literary criticism to its greatest development.

In the 2d cent. Marcus Fronto distinguished himself as an orator; his pupil Marcus Aurelius gained fame both as a ruler and as one of the masters of the Latin essay. In the 3d and 4th cent. the writings of Ausonius and Avienus extended beyond classical studies, developing traditional themes to deal with everyday life and the world of nature. Claudian is considered the best of the late poets. Ammianus Marcellinus was a noted historian. The philological scholars of the empire were numerous. These included Aulus Gellius, Terentianus, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Priscian.

As the classical inspiration died, the tradition of Latin literature was borrowed from and carried forward in Christian writing. Prudentius attempted to build a Christian style on classical models, but failed. The Latin language became the standard language of the West and by far the greater bulk of medieval literature as well as records, documents, and letters was written in Latin (see patristic literature; Medieval Latin literature; Roman law).

The Renaissance

The literature of the Renaissance represents a conscious attempt to recapture the classical spirit. Most learned people cultivated Latin, and many of them succeeded in writing a Latin style that stands comparison with classical Latin models. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poggio Bracciolini, Poliziano, Pontano, and Pius II were accomplished Latin writers. Erasmus violently attacked the ubiquitous Ciceronianism of the time.

Later Latin Literature

Good Latin poets have been fewer since the Renaissance, but George Buchanan and John Milton are among the exceptions. Among the great scholars whose major works were written in Latin were Thomas More, Baruch Spinoza, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. Latin literature, as such, is nearly dead, for its cultivation is limited to the ever-narrowing circles of classicists and to the Roman Catholic Church, which adds new matter to the liturgy only rarely and confines use of extraliturgical Latin to official, nonliterary documents.

See also Asian drama.

Earliest Writings

Although Japanese and Chinese are different languages, the Japanese borrowed and adapted Chinese ideographs early in the 8th cent. in order to render their spoken language in written form. Because Japanese is better suited to phonetic transcription, the result is a language of extremely complicated linguistic construction.

In 712 the new writing system was used in the compilation of orally preserved poems and stories into the Kojiki [records of ancient matters], an account of the divine creation of Japan and its imperial clan. Another historical work, the Nihon-shoki [chronicles of Japan] (721), was written in Chinese. The oldest anthology of Japanese verse, Manyoshu [collection of a myriad leaves] (760), contains about 4,500 poems, many from much earlier times. A number of the poems in this collection are more varied in form and more passionate in statement than those written in later eras.

The Heian Era

The addition of two phonetic syllabaries (katakana and hiragana) during the Heian era (794-1185) opened the classic age, in which Japanese literature reached its first peak of development. Classical Chinese still predominated in intellectual literary circles and official court communications, yet literature in the native language, the only written medium permitted to educated women, gained increasing prestige. In his travel journal Tosa Nikki [Tosa diary] (936), the poet Ki no Tsurayuki assumed a female persona in order to write in Japanese.

Much Heian literature of note was written by aristocratic women, foremost among whom was Murasaki Shikibu (Lady Murasaki). Her Genji monogatari [tale of Genji] (early 11th cent.) is ranked with the world's greatest novels. Sei Shonagon, another contemporary court lady, wrote Makura no soshi [the pillow book], a compilation of miscellaneous notes and reflections that provides an excellent portrait of Heian aristocratic life, with its emphasis on elegance—always an important element of the Japanese aesthetic.

Ki no Tsurayuki was the leading spirit in the compilation of the Kokinwakashu [collection of ancient and modern verse], the first imperial anthology of Japanese poetry. This collection, which established the model for 21 subsequent imperial anthologies, contained some 1,100 poems organized by topic, written in the tanka form of 31 syllables. The Japanese have always esteemed poetry as the highest of literary arts, and poets regarded inclusion in a poetry anthology as a supreme honor.

Medieval Literature

In the subsequent medieval period (c.1200-1600), themes and concerns central to the newly ascendant warrior class took expression in such works as the Heike monogatari [tale of the Heike], an epic account of the struggle between two great clans that ended the Heian period. Much medieval poetry and prose is colored by Buddhist thought. The somber Hojoki [account of my hut] (c.1212) and the elegant Tsurezuregusa [essays in idleness] (1330), both written by Buddhist renunciants, exemplify the range of literary expression proceeding from a Buddhist sensibility. Buddhist tale literature, ranging from collections of short didactic lessons to lengthy narratives, was also widely produced. The most famous of these, the late Heian Konjaku monogatari shû [tales from past and present], consists of over 1,200 stories of tremendous variety and scope.

The medieval period witnessed the development of noh, a serious dramatic form combining dance, music, chanting, and mime, and kyogen, short comedies performed in interludes between noh plays. The greatest writers of noh plays were Kanami Kiyotsugu (1333-84) and his son Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443), who developed the noh from its primitive origins to the highly purified and rigorous art form that later influenced such Western poets as W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. While the prestige and production of the tanka continued undiminished, renga, a linked verse form governed by elaborate conventions, composed by single or multiple poets, became popular in the latter half of the medieval period.

Literary Forms of the Edo Era

Otogi-zoshi, short prose fiction popular among a range of social classes, anticipated the broadening social base of literature that developed with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603, when almost total cultural and physical isolation from other countries created economic conditions that led to a thriving culture of the bourgeoisie. Early Edo prose literature encompassed a diverse range of subjects: didactic tracts, travel guides, essays, satires, and picaresque fiction. Ihara Saikaku was the foremost master of this last form; his novel Koshoku ichidai onna [the life of an amorous woman] is an ironic look at a world of pleasure and eroticism.

The literary tastes of the bourgeoisie also contributed to the development of the kabuki and puppet (joruri; also known as bunraku) theaters. Plays by dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), originally written for the puppet theater but adapted into kabuki performance as well, are important in world literature as the first mature tragedies written about the common man. Matsuo Basho, regarded as the greatest of haiku poets, brought the developing haiku, a 17-syllable poem, into full flower. Yosa Buson (1716-81) and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) were also important haiku poets. Later Edo fiction, called gesaku, was mostly comic or satirical in nature, although it also included long Confucian didactic tales.

Western Influence

After the dramatic opening of Japan to the West in 1858, the flood of translations from Western literature that followed induced the Japanese to give prose fiction a new direction and psychological realism. Tsubouchi Shoyo (1859-1935) had a profound effect on the modern Japanese novel with his critical study Shosetsu-shinzui [the essence of the novel] (1885), in which he urged the use of colloquial speech rather than the rarefied literary language used by previous writers. Ukigumo [the drifting cloud] (1887-89), by Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909), was the first novel written in colloquial language. The "I novel," a type of personal semifictitious autobiography, was dominant for a time, followed by naturalist and proletarian novels.

Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai were two major figures of early-20th-century fiction. Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is known for his unusual stories based in part on earlier tale literature and folklore. Japanese literature suffered a slump during World War II, when the government censored literary expression it considered contrary to the interests of the state. Nagai Kafu (1870-1959), with his talent for verbal portraiture, nevertheless remained a popular figure during this time.

Postwar Literature

The immense public demand for fiction in postwar Japan has been fed by the prolific output of its writers. Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, has been praised for the delicate aesthetic sensibility of his novels. Junichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, Fumiko Enchi, Shusaku Endo, Sawako Ariyoshi, and Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994, are just a few of the modern Japanese writers who have attracted international admiration.

In their search to define a modern Japanese poetic voice, modern poets and dramatists have both revived old forms and created new means of expression. Akiko Yosano is known for the lushness and eroticism of her tanka; Sakutaro Hagiwara (1886-1942), for his deft incorporation of symbolism into the lyric mode; and Kotaro Takamura, for his free verse on a range of subjects. In modern drama, playwright Junji Kinoshita (b. 1914) borrowed elements from the Japanese folk tradition; Mishima wrote dramatic adaptations of noh plays and Japanese legends, while Minoru Betsuyaku (b. 1937), Makoto Sato (b. 1943), and others pioneered underground theater in the late 1960s.

Although modern Japanese poetry and drama have not received as much attention from the West as have novels and short stories, Japanese literature is recognized as a major branch of world literature, and most major works are available in English translation.

The Thirteenth Century

The first Italian vernacular literature began to take shape in the 13th cent. with the imitation of Provençal lyric poetry at the court of Frederick II in Sicily. The Sicilians are credited with inventing the sonnet, which became the most widely used form of Italian poetry and later flourished throughout Europe. The Sicilian style was dominant in the north until c.1260, when Guido Guinizelli, a Bolognese poet and jurist, moved from the Provençal conception of courtly love to a more mystical and philosophical spirituality.

The poets who took Guinizelli as their model originated the "sweet new style" (dolce stil novo)—so named by Dante Alighieri in canto 24 of his Purgatorio. The group included Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, Lapo Gianni, Dino Frescobaldi, and Dante himself, whose youthful La vita nuova, part prose and part poetry, recounts the poet's love for Beatrice in terms of the transcendental view of love typical of the stil novo. Dante's other works, of which the Divine Comedy is a masterpiece of world literature, go beyond the themes and manner of stil novo and embrace the whole of contemporary knowledge and experience. Dante invented the difficult terza rima (iambic tercets) for his epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

The 13th cent. also produced folk poetry, doctrinal poetry, imitations of the chansons de geste in various dialects, and a magnificent flowering of religious poetry in the laudi of Jacopone da Todi and in the Hymn to Created Things of St. Francis of Assisi. Laudi in dialogue form represent the beginning of dramatic literature, the sacre rappresentazioni. Prose works included translations from the Latin and French as well as collections of tales, anecdotes, and witty sayings.

The Fourteenth Century

The two great writers of the 14th cent., Petrarch and Boccaccio, sought out and imitated the works of antiquity and cultivated their own artistic personalities. Petrarch achieved fame through his collection of poems, the Canzoniere, in which he gave Provençal and stil novo themes a peculiarly intimate and personal expression. Petrarch's poetry served as the model for European lyricism until the Romantic period and later. Equally influential was Boccaccio's Decameron, a collection of 100 novellas within a framework, which founded the short-story genre. Giovanni Sercambi and Franco Sacchetti in the 14th cent. and Matteo Bandello and Agnolo Firenzuola in the 16th cent. were among the numerous writers who continued the tradition of vivid, realistic, and often licentious storytelling in prose.

The Renaissance

The Tuscan vernacular that had been established by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio was inhibited by a strong return to Latin in the 15th cent. among humanist writers and philosophers. Coluccio Salutati, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola were among the writers and scholars who sought to return to the fonts of classical antiquity for inspiration and guidance in matters of language, literary style, moral instruction, and simply a new vision of the relation of humanity to its surroundings and to God. When the vernacular began to be used again in the late 15th cent., poetic language and tastes had been refined by the values of humanist learning.

In the circle of Lorenzo de'Medici, Tuscan vernacular was used in popular, Petrarchan, and pastoral poetry and in a return to medieval subject matter. Luigi Pulci's grotesque Morgante (c.1480) recounts the adventures of Orlando (Charlemagne's Roland) and other paladins with great comic verve. Boiardo's Orlando innamorato (3 parts, 1483-1494) adds Breton subject matter to the Carolingian and introduces motifs from classical mythology and contemporary society. The great masterpiece of Italian Renaissance poetry is Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516, rev. 1521 and 1532), in which varied and improbable adventures are worked into an aesthetic whole. The great lyric poet Tasso in Gerusalemme liberata (1581) wrote a Christian epic, making use of the same form (ottava rima), with attention to the Aristotelian canons of unity.

Other Renaissance genres brought to a high level of perfection by outstanding writers were the pastoral poem (Poliziano, Tasso, and Guarini); the pastoral romance (Sannazaro); the Petrarchan lyric (Bembo, Michelangelo, Gaspara Stampa); imitations of classical tragedy (Trissino) and classical comedy (Ariosto, Machiavelli, Aretino); dialogues in the Platonic manner (Castiglione's The Courtier); treatises on a variety of topics (Leonardo's Della pittura; Alberti's Della famiglia; Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua, which established the principle of linguistic purism for Italian literature; and Machiavelli's The Prince); biographical and autobiographical writings (Vasari, Machiavelli, and Cellini); and history (Guicciardini and Machiavelli).

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

In the early 17th cent. philosophic and scientific prose (Campanella, Galileo) continued and surpassed the achievements of Giordano Bruno. But the new literary style, secentismo, or marinismo (from Giambattista Marino), aimed at dazzling the reader by the opulent use of rhetorical devices. At the end of the century the Arcadians began a movement to restore simplicity and classical restraint to poetry, as in Metastasio's heroic melodramas. The mock-heroic epic (Tassoni), the opera, and commedia dell'arte were other genres cultivated in the 17th cent.

The renewal of Italian culture in the 18th cent. produced major works of journalism (Gaspare Gozzi, Giuseppe Baretti, and the Milanese Caffè), philosophical and historical erudition (Vico, Muratori, and Tiraboschi), and translations from classical antiquity and from contemporary European writers. The outstanding Italian representatives of the Enlightenment were Carlo Goldoni, whose comedies of character drew upon contemporary life, Vittorio Alfieri, whose classical tragedies exalted freedom, and Giuseppe Parini, whose satirical poetry attacked the social abuses of the privileged.

The Napoleonic Era and the Risorgimento

The Napoleonic period was both classical and romantic. The poetry of Vincenzo Monti typifies the first direction, and the work of Ugo Foscolo belongs to the second. A distinguishing feature of Italian romanticism was its political involvement in the struggle for Italian independence, the Risorgimento. Poems, historical novels, and political works, such as Giuseppe Mazzini's, attest to this.

Alessandro Manzoni's literary conversion included the rejection of classical mythology in favor of Christian subject matter, and of classical tragedy for romantic drama. His historical novel, I promessi sposi (1827), which introduced the genre to Italy, combined social and psychological realism with Roman Catholic doctrine and established a new Italian linguistic norm and prose style. Giacomo Leopardi rejected the program of romanticism but wrote lyric poetry in which the romantic themes of despair predominate.

The Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

In the second half of the 19th cent. Francesco De Sanctis, literary critic and historian, laid the theoretical and aesthetic foundations of modern Italian criticism, later elaborated by the philosopher Benedetto Croce. Giosuè Carducci brought to poetry a virility and classicism long absent. But Pascoli and D'Annunzio had a more lasting influence. Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, novelist, and dramatist, employed sensuous, musical, and precious language. Giovanni Pascoli is Italy's great symbolist poet of the subconscious. The naturalistic, the irrational, and the decadent are also revealed in the work of the playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello. Pirandello's prose roots are in Sicilian verismo, the impersonal, objective regionalism of Fiovanni Verga's works.

Major 20th-century novelists of note include Italo Svevo, Alberto Moravia, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo Gadda, Leonardo Sciascia, and Natalia Ginzburg. Their work is variously marked by psychological analysis, social consciousness, and formal and linguistic experimentation. The outstanding poets are Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, Umberto Saba, and Salvatore Quasimodo.

Today there is a written literature in all the important languages of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as a large literature in English intended to reach all the university-educated public regardless of native language. Among the best-known writers of the 19th and early 20th cent. are Rammohun Roy, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Prem Chand, as well as Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Muhammad Iqbal, the Muslim poets who wrote in Urdu and in Persian. Later writers include R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Bhabhani Bhattacharya, Ahmed Ali, Khushwant Singh, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, and Mulk Raj Anand in the field of fiction; Sarojini Naidu, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Nazrul Islam, in the field of poetry; and Mohandas Gandhi, M. N. Roy, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Jaya Prakash Narayan in the field of politics.

See also Sanskrit literature; Pali canon; Prakrit literature.

Early Writings

With Iceland's loss of political independence (1261-64) came a decline in literature, although the linguistic tradition continued and the old writings were still venerated. In the 13th and 14th cent. the sagas of antiquity flourished; many were based on Eddic poems (see Edda). Chivalric romances appeared c.1300, emphasizing classical and ecclesiastical themes and showing French influence. From the 14th to the middle of the 16th cent. many foreign works were translated; Old Norse works were copied and compiled, and new religious poems were written in the old meters. The 14th cent. also saw the development of the rímur, metrically ingenious narrative poetry based on the sagas; it was popular until the 19th cent. and was revived in the 20th.

The Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

The Protestant Reformation, reaching Iceland in the 16th cent., turned literary emphasis to hymns and illuminations of the Protestant faith. Einar Sigurdsson (1538-1626) was the great spiritual poet of the age. The first printing press was brought to Iceland in 1528 by Bishop Jón Aresson. From the Reformation until the late 18th cent. it was under church control; secular works were circulated in manuscript. After 1550, German and Danish influences were strong.

The great secular poets of the 17th cent. were Hallgrímur Petursson (1614-74), author of the Passion Hymns, and the satirist Stefan Olafsson (1620-88). Neoclassicism dominated literary style in the late 18th cent. In the early 19th cent. Árni Magnusson compiled a library of ancient Icelandic masterpieces.

The Creation of a Modern Icelandic Style

Continental romanticism and a newly aroused nationalism fed the romantic revival begun in the 1830s by the poets Bjarni Thorarensen (1786-1841) and Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807-45). The first writer of the modern Icelandic short story, Hallgrímsson also influenced Jón Thóroddsen, who wrote the first published Icelandic novel. This movement, whose practitioners created what became the classic Icelandic style of the 19th and 20th cent., was continued by Grimur Thomsen (1820-96), writer of heroic narrative poems; Benedikt Grondal (1826-1907), romantic and humorous poet; Steingrímur Thorsteinsson (1831-1913), lyric poet, satirist, and translator; and Matthías Jochumsson (1835-1920), whose plays mark the beginning of modern Icelandic drama. The towering figure of the period was the historian and statesman Jón Sigurðsson.

The periodical Verdandi [the present], founded in 1882, advanced a new realism—strongly socialistic, individualistic, and anticlerical, and influenced by the Danish critic Georg Brandes. Notable realists include the short-story writer and social critic Gestur Palsson (1852-91); the Icelandic-Canadian poet Stephan G. Stephansson (1853-1927); and the anticlerical satirist and lyric poet Thorsteinn Erlingsson (1858-1914). Einar H. Kvaran (1859-1938), at first a realist, later turned to religious and spiritual themes in his short stories about the poor in Reykjavík. Jón Trausti (pseud. of Guðmundur Magnusson, 1873-1918) in his fiction depicted medieval as well as modern Iceland.

The Twentieth Century

The 20th cent. saw the rise of a more introspective writing, influenced by Nietzsche and the French symbolists. One group of writers, part of the Icelandic colony in Copenhagen, wrote in Danish to reach a wider public. They were led by Johann Sigurjonsson (1880-1919), a romantic dramatist. Others were the romantic novelist Gunnar Gunnarsson and the cosmopolitan dramatist Guðmundur Kamban. A neoromantic movement arose in the 1920s; it had as a leading spirit the poet, scholar, and critic Sigurdur Nordal, author of the prose poem Hel (1919). Among the neoromantics were the novelists Guðmundur Hagalin and Kristmann Guðmundsson and the lyric poets Davið Stefánsson and Stefan Sigurdsson.

With the urbanization of Iceland's population came the rise of a working class and new patterns of life and thought. Kamban and Trausti early became socialists; Hagalin turned from conservative journalism to become thoroughly identified with the new socialist middle class. The most noted writer of this period was the Nobel laureate Halldor K. Laxness. The establishment of British and American bases in Iceland during World War II introduced foreign literary influence, and Icelandic independence (1944) increased nationalist and patriotic emphasis. In the 1950s the introspective "atom poets," including Stefan H. Grimsson and Hannes Sigfursson, won acclaim. Major writers of the late 20th cent. include Agnar Thórðarson, Elias Mar, Oddur Björnsson, Hannes Pétursson, and Jökull Jakobsson.

Early Literature

The great monuments of the earliest period of Hebrew literature are the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. Parts of the Pseudepigrapha and of the Dead Sea Scrolls were also produced before the conquest of Judaea by Titus. The literature of the Jews developed mainly in the Hebrew language, although there were also works in Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic.

In the 2d cent. A.D. began the Talmudic period, which lasted well into the 6th cent. In these centuries the great anonymous encyclopedic work of religious and civil law, the Talmud, was compiled, edited, and interpreted. The Midrash—a collection of halakah (found also in the Talmud) and haggadic material—likewise forms part of the Hebrew literature of that period. In the 4th cent. the Targum to the Pentateuch and to the Prophets was finished. The 6th and 7th cent. saw the development of the Masora in Palestine. In Babylonia meanwhile many valuable additions to Hebrew literature were made by the Gaonim after the 6th cent.

Medieval Literature

Commentaries on the Talmud and haggadic material continued to be written until the 11th cent., when the Babylonian academies were suppressed and the center of Jewish literary activity shifted to Spain. France and Germany became the main centers of Talmudic commentary. In Spain, and to some extent in Italy, Hebrew literature flourished for centuries. The finest work was accomplished in the realms of poetry—influenced by Arab and Indian literature—and philosophy. Philology, exegesis, and codification also flourished. By the 14th cent. the largely Aramaic mystical treatise, the Zohar, had appeared—the masterpiece of a flourishing literature of Jewish mysticism (see kabbalah).

Famous scholars and authors of Hebrew literature in the Middle Ages included Aha of Shabcha, Saadia ben Joseph al-Fayumi, Dunash ben Tamim, Dunash ben Labrat, Gershom ben Judah, Al-Fasi, Solomon ben Judah Ibn Gabirol, Rashi, Judah ha-Levi, Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Immanuel ben Solomon, Isaac Abravanel, and Joseph ben Ephraim Caro. In the persecutions following the Crusades, when the Jews were driven from country to country, they clung to their literature—which leaned increasingly to mysticism and asceticism—and especially to the Hebrew Bible.

Beginnings of Modern Hebrew Literature

On the threshold of the transition from the old isolated life to a wider one was the poet Moses Hayyim Luzzatto—a contemporary of the Gaon of Vilna, Elijah ben Solomon—but the modern period of Hebrew literature really began with Moses Mendelssohn. While Nachman Krochmal and Shloime Ansky (Solomon Seinwel Rapoport) were contributing to biblical criticism and historical scholarship, writers such as Peretz (Peter) Smolenskin were devoting themselves to Haskalah, or literature of enlightenment, intended to shake the Jews of Central Europe from their medieval attitudes. Other important figures of the period are the scholar Joseph Halévy, the poet Jehuda (Leon) Gordon, and the novelist Solomon Yakob Abramovich, whose pseudonym was Mendele mocher sforim.

Zionism and Literature in Israel

The rise of Zionism, particularly reflected in the writings of Ahad Ha-am (Asher Ginzberg), gave Hebrew literature fresh impetus, and Palestine became again the center of publication in Hebrew. Hebrew was proclaimed the national language of the Jews even before the establishment (1948) of the state of Israel. The two great poets of modern Hebrew literature are Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Saul Tchernihovsky, who was strongly influenced by ancient Greek literature. The poetry of Abraham Shlonsky, Lea Goldberg, and Nathan Alterman deals with social and political themes.

Among the many writers of prose are Joseph H. Brenner, who described Jewish life in Eastern Europe and pioneer life in Palestine, and Salman Shneur, who wrote of the simple and uneducated Jews. The Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon portrayed the Eastern European milieu and pioneer life in Palestine; his works have become classics in modern Hebrew epic literature. Hebrew writers who are native to Israel seek inspiration in the classical Hebrew past or in the new life of Israel. The most outstanding writer of this group is Moshe Shamir, who in his two novels—one depicting a Hasmonean king and the other dealing with the Arab-Israeli War of 1948—gave new dimensions to Hebrew fiction.

Aron David Gordon (1856-1922) was one of the greatest social and political essayists of Hebrew literature; significant Hebrew language literary critics include David Frishman (1861-1922) and Yosef Klausner (1874-1958). In recent years the Israeli novelists Amos Oz, Abraham B. Yehoshua, and Aharon Appelfeld, and the poet Yehuda Amichai have been widely translated and have achieved international distinction. Outside Israel, the writing of the Jews is ordinarily in the language of the countries in which they live or in Yiddish, whose literary use developed rapidly after the middle of the 19th cent.

The Rebirth of Greek Literature

Under Turkish rule, Greek literature virtually ceased, except in Crete. In the late 18th cent. two patriots, the poet Rhigas Pheraios (1751-98) and the intellectual Adamantios Koraës (1748-1833), sought to encourage a revival of Greek letters. The revolutionary society Philike Hetairea, founded in 1816, reflected the growing influence in Greece of the French Enlightenment and the rise of European romanticism; both furnished the intellectual framework for the War of Independence (1821-27) and spurred the postwar nationalist revival that awakened a modern Greek literature.

The Language Debate

Literature was hampered, however, by conflict between supporters of the demotic, or popular, literary style, and adherents of a reformed classical style. The Greeks had been completely cut off from the classical tradition by centuries of Turkish occupation and the successful revolution had created such pride in the new nation that there were many champions of a demotic style. Others hoped to restore the classical language which, until the 15th cent., had had an unbroken tradition. Throughout the rest of the 19th cent. and also in the 20th cent., the reformed classical and demotic styles were upheld by uncompromising adherents.

Displaying the impact of Byron's romanticism, the poetry of Alexandros Rangabe (1810-92) offered the finest example of the classical style. Demetrios Vernadakis (1834-1907) and Spyridon Vasiliadis (1845-74) were 19th-century dramatists who wrote romantic plays in classical speech forms. While only recognized as the official language in 1976, demotic Greek won increasing acceptance in all literary genres, particularly in poetry, which flourished above all other forms in modern Greek literature.

The Ionian poets of the middle and late 19th cent. freely used the vernacular. Their leader was Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857), a poet strongly under the influence of German idealism, whose "Ode to Liberty" became the national anthem. Others were Andreas Kalvos (1796-1869), Andreas Lascaratos (1811-1901), the poet Aristotle Valaoritis (1824-79), and the critic Jacob Polylas (1824-96). The Greek-French Jean Psichari (1854-1929) aroused a storm with his satire of the purists, The Voyage (1888), and the publication in 1901 of a demotic translation of the New Testament caused a riot in Athens among university students.

The demotic had the staunch support of such outstanding poets as Kostes Palamas; the classicist Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933); the popular George Drossinis (1859-1951); and the collector of folk poetry, Apostolos Melachrinos. The short stories of Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851-1911) and Argyris Eftaliotis (1849-1923) expressed indigenous themes in the vernacular. Demotic dramatists include the naturalists Ioannis Kambisis (1872-1902) and the psychological dramatist Gregorios Xenopoulos (1867-1951), also an outstanding novelist. In 1927 the poet Angelos Sikelianos and his wife furthered the demotic cause with presentations at Delphi of classic Greek drama in the vernacular.

The Twentieth Century

In general, 20th-century Greek literature reflects the evolution of European modernism in such various forms as French symbolism and surrealism or British-American experiments in narrative technique. Symbolism appears in the work of George Seferis and George Kostiras, surrealism in that of Odysseus Elytis. Recognized as masters of modern Greek letters, Seferis and Elytis each received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1963 and 1979, respectively. The poet Maria Polydouri (1902-30) gained renown through her intense, erotic love lyrics. The effort of modern Greek writers to achieve a synthesis of the rich traditions of the Greek heritage is well represented in the work of Nikos Kazantzakis.

Novelists such as Stratis Tsirkas (1911-81), Costas Taktsis (1927-), and Vassilis Vassilikos (1934-) have combined formal innovation with a close analysis of postwar Greek society. Meanwhile, a group of women lyric poets have gained distinction, including Victoria Theodorou (1928-), Angeliki Paulopoulou (1930-), Eleni Fourtouni (1933-), and Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1934-). In 1967 the government of King Constantine II was overthrown in a bloodless coup by a group of army colonels; despite strict censorship, antigovernment works still found their way into print. With the fall of the military government in 1974, civil liberties were restored and censorship ceased.

Early Writings

The earliest extant European literary works are the Iliad and the Odyssey, both written in ancient Greek probably before 700 B.C., and attributed to Homer. Among other early epic poems, most of which have perished, those of Hesiod, the first didactic poet, remain. The poems dealing with mythological subjects and known as the Homeric Hymns are dated 800-300 B.C. Only fragments survive of the works of many early Greek poets, including the elegiasts Tyrtaeus, Theognis, Solon, Semonides of Amorgos, Archilochus, and Hipponax. The most personal Greek poems are the lyrics of Alcaeus, Sappho and Anacreon. The Dorian lyric for choral performance, developed with Alcman, Ibycus, and Stesichorus, achieved perfection in Pindar, Simonides of Ceos, and Bacchylides.

The Classical Period

Greek drama evolved from the song and dance in the ceremonies honoring Dionysus at Athens. In the 5th cent. B.C. tragedy was developed by three of the greatest dramatists in the history of the theater, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Equally exalted was the foremost exponent of Attic Old Comedy, Aristophanes. Other writers who developed this genre included Cratinus and Eupolis, of whom little is known. The rowdy humor of these early works gave way to the more sedate Middle Comedy and finally to New Comedy, which set the form for this type of drama. The best-known writer of Greek New Comedy is Menander.

The writing of history came of age in Greece with the rich and diffuse work of Herodotus, the precise and exhaustive accounts of Thucydides, and the rushing narrative of Xenophon. Philosophical writing of unprecedented breadth was produced during this brief period of Athenian literature; the works of Plato and Aristotle have had an incalculable effect in the shaping of Western thought.

Greek oratory, of immense importance in the ancient world, was perfected at this time. Among the most celebrated orators were Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Aeschines, and, considered the greatest of all, Demosthenes. "Classical" Greek literature is said to have ended with the deaths of Aristotle and Demosthenes (c.322 B.C.). The greatest writers of the classical era have certain characteristics in common: economy of words, direct expression, subtlety of thought, and attention to form.

Later Greek Literature

The next period of Greek literature reached its zenith in Hellenistic Alexandria, where a number of major philosophers, dramatists, poets, historians, critics, and librarians wrote and taught. New genres such as bucolic poetry emerged during the Hellenistic period, a time also characterized by scholarly editions of classics from earlier periods. The poems of Callimachus, the bucolics of Theocritus, and the epic of Apollonius Rhodius are recognized as major works of world literature.

The production of literary works at the time of the establishment of Roman control of the Mediterranean was enormous, a vast heterogeneous mixture ranging from the sublime to the pedantic and turgid. A great portion of the works produced have been lost. With the Roman political subjugation of Greece, Greek thought and culture, introduced largely by slave-tutors to the Roman aristocracy, came to exert enormous influence in the Roman world. Among the greatest writers of this period were the historians Polybius, Josephus, and Dio Cassius; the biographer Plutarch; the philosophers Philo and Dio Chrysostom; and the novelist Lucian. One great Roman work produced under Greek influence was the philosophical meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

With the spread of Christianity, Greek writing took a new turn, and much of the writing of the Greek Fathers of the Church is eloquent. Religion dominated the literature of the Byzantine Empire, and a vast treasury of writing was produced that is not generally well known to the West The most notable exception is the work of some historians (e.g., Procopius, Anna Comnena, George Acropolita, and Emperor John VI) and some anthologists (e.g., Photius).

Old and Middle High German: From Early to Medieval Literature

Heroic legends, among them the Lay of Hildebrand, date from the turn of the 8th cent. to the 9th cent. and are the earliest known works in Old High German (see German language). The Waltherius (10th cent.) is written in Latin. Low German and Saxon dialects are also used in these epics. Writings of the 9th to the 11th cent., largely inspired by the church, include the works of the monks Rabanus Maurus Magnentius, Otfried, and Notker Labeo.

The succeeding period of Middle High German (12th-14th cent.) is characterized by chivalric poetry, such as the songs and lyrics of the minnesingers on courtly love and other subjects. Courtly epics, such as Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (see Parsifal), were often based on French troubadour and trouvère sources (see troubadours; trouvères), while epics like the Nibelungenlied (see under Nibelungen) and Gudrun use Germanic traditions. A gradual decline of chivalric poetry is evident in the works of Ulrich von Lichtenstein, and the rise of the urban literary traditions is seen in such epics as Wernher der Gartenaere's Meier Helmbrecht (c.1250).

The Protestant Reformation, High German, and Literary Academies: The Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

After 1400 more popular literary forms became dominant: folk songs, fables, folktales, and short plays. The aristocratic heritage of the minnesingers was replaced by meistersingers, notably Hans Sachs. The Reformation profoundly influenced the course of German literature, and Martin Luther's translation (1522-34) of the Bible propagated a unified High German language. Religious and scholarly writings were also affected by humanism; German humanists included Ulrich von Hutten and Conradus Celtes.

The Thirty Years War (1618-48) brought religious schism, widespread devastation, and, concomitantly, a consolidation of national consciousness resulting in a flowering of German literature with strong courtly and absolutist tendencies. Literary academies, arising in Hamburg, Nuremberg, and other cities, worked for the purification and development of the German language. Most influential was the Silesian school, which included Martin Opitz, noted for his metrical reforms, and the poets Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau (1618-79), Paul Fleming (1609-40), Andreas Gryphius, and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. Leading writers of hymns were the Protestant Paul Gerhardt and the Catholic Angelus Silesius. Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669), a picaresque account of the Thirty Years War, may be considered the first German novel.

The Eighteenth Century

The great age of German literature began in the 18th cent. The classicist theories of Johann Christoph Gottsched aroused violent critical reactions, indirectly paving the way for Friedrich Klopstock and especially for Gotthold Lessing, the greatest preclassical critic and dramatist. The period known as Sturm und Drang embraced the works of Johann Hamann, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Jakob Lenz.

The period also encompassed the early works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Goethe and Schiller were widely considered the greatest figures in the subsequent classical period, when artistic forms in general were characterized by restraint, lucidity, and balance (see classicism). Their cultural ideals, expressed in the novel of self-formation or Bildungsroman, were also spread by C. M. Wieland and Friedrich Hölderlin, the age's greatest German poet.

At the end of the 18th cent. literary romanticism, initiated in Germany by the brothers Friedrich and H. W. von Schlegel and by Novalis, brought greater emphasis on subjective emotion. A new literary form appeared in the novelle, a prose tale often dealing with supernatural elements. Typical early romantic poets were Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and Joachim von Arnim, who were also collectors and editors of folktales and folk songs, sometimes set to music by Robert Schumann and other composers.

Freiherr von Eichendorff, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Ludwig Uhland were other notable German romantics. The movement's historical tendencies were supplemented by the philological and folkloristic researches of the brothers Grimm. The writer E. T. A. Hoffmann was romanticism's greatest psychologist of the unconscious. Hovering between classicism and romanticism, Heinrich von Kleist's stories and plays were masterpieces of dramatic economy, other important playwrights were Franz Grillparzer and C. F. Hebbel.

The Nineteenth Century: Realism and Naturalism

The revolutionary literary movement known as Young Germany, which strove to arouse German political opinion, turned from romanticism to the more sober realism; its great leaders were Karl Börne and Heinrich Heine. Realism was consolidated in the influential social novels of Theodor Fontane, whereas Eduard Mörike and Adalbert Stifter adhered to a form of classicism. The theory of realism was further developed by the school of naturalism, represented by the young Gerhart Hauptmann.

The Twentieth Century

Antinaturalistic movements grew stronger in the German imperialistic period. They became evident as symbolism and impressionism in poetry (Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal) and in the novel (Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch) and as expressionism in verse (Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, Gottfried Benn) and drama (Frank Wedekind, Georg Kaiser, Bertolt Brecht). The literature of the Weimar Republic carried forward prewar traditions and excelled in formal experimentation and innovation. This activity was stifled by the rise of National Socialism, which forced leading writers like Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig into emigration.

The postwar decades saw a gradual literary resurgence, with the social and critical novels of authors like Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Max Frisch gaining prominance. Two important centers of literary activity were Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter in Germany, and the Vienna Circle, which attracted a number of experimental writers, such as H. C. Artmann and Ernst Jandl in Austria. East Germany's writers generally upheld the tenets of socialist realism, while those in the west were more varied.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, both groups were preoccupied with the Nazi period. Among the significant German writers were Ingeborg Bachmann, Horst Bienek, Johannes Bobrowski, Uwe Johnson, Arno Schmidt, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss, and Christa Wolf. Some of the German-language writers who have received the greatest recent international attention are the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard and the Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan.

Old Irish

The early literature has survived in Middle and Late Middle Irish manuscripts that are, for the most part, miscellaneous collections of prose and verse in which legend, history, bardic and lyric poetry, and medical, legal, and religious writings of several periods are all preserved side by side. The chief works are the Book of the Dun Cow (before 1106), the Book of Leinster (before 1160), and the Yellow Book of Lecan, the Great Book of Lecan, the Lebor Brecc, and the Book of Lismore (late 14th or early 15th cent.). The first three are especially important because they contain the heroic sagas. The oldest writings are poems from the 6th cent.; Dallán Forgaill is the most famous of the filid or official poets. There are also some fine anonymous nature poems from the 8th cent.

Middle Irish

With the 9th-century (Middle Irish) period begin the heroic tales in which epic and romance go hand in hand. These stories were classified by the medieval Irish according to type. In modern times they have been divided into two major cycles, the Ulster and the Fenian.

The Ulster cycle deals with swaggering pagan heroes of the century before Christ. Its central hero and the hero of its longest story, Táin Bó Cúalnge [the cattle raid of Cooley], is Cuchulain, an Irish Achilles. The finest of all the Ulster stories is Longes Mac Nusnig [exile of the sons of Usnech], the tragedy of Deirdre. This early Celtic literature is characterized by a simplicity and terseness of style interspersed with richness of imagery, color, and detail.

The Fenian tradition, which became prominent in the late Middle Irish period, is 300 years later than the Ulster. Paganism is modified and Christianity is represented as coming in the extreme old age of Ossian, the poet of the Fenians. The temper is more romantic than epic—the lyrics sing more of nature, love, and separation than of war and death. The characteristic form of this cycle is the ballad. Its ideal hero is Finn, the Irish counterpart of the Welsh Arthur. The Fenian cycle begins with the composition of the long Acallam na Senórech [colloquy of the old men], c.1200. The great prose story of the cycle is Tóraigheacht Agus Ghráinne [the pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne], a variant of the Ulster story of Deirdre.

Except for Deirdre, the Ulster tales have been forgotten while Fenian legends have survived to modern times, especially in Scotland. The variety of motifs encompassed by the cycles—the doomed lovers, the knights-errant, adventures in an earthly paradise, visions and voyages—influenced medieval romance. The privileged position held by the poet in ancient Ireland was continued after the advent of Christianity. Poets, who were the successors of pagan priests, became guardians of the native tradition, and, after the coming of the Norman English in the 12th and 13th cent., the spokesmen of Gaelic culture. The late medieval prose includes one of the most celebrated Gaelic narrative collections, The Three Sorrows of Storytelling.

Late Middle Irish and Modern Irish

The 16th and 17th cent. saw a great poetic revival and the rise of modern Irish prose. Gaelic Ireland was now fighting a losing battle with England, and as the English conquered, Gaelic literature became more passionately patriotic and more militantly Catholic. Prose of the 16th and 17th cent. in Ireland is transitional; it begins with some delightful tales in Middle Irish and comes to its fruition with Geoffrey Keating, whose religious works and monumental historical study of Ireland are the foundation of modern Irish literature. The greatest Irish scholar of the time was Michael O'Clery; among other students of Gaelic culture were some English-speaking Protestants, notably Bedell, bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh, translator of the Old Testament.

The penal age of Ireland may be dated from Cromwell's arrival (1649). During this time Gaelic literature served to keep alive the old culture of the submerged Catholics. From Paris and Louvain came a stream of religious books in Gaelic, probably published by the Franciscans, who at this time became the chief guardians of the Irish language. Even before Cromwell and the intense hardships suffered under English rule, however, bardic poetry had begun to decline. The early 17th cent. was an age of transition from the strict verse of the bardic schools to the less formal meters of untrained poets. Chief among the poets were Aodhagán Ó Raithille, Eóghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin, Brian Merriman, and Anthony Raftery.

That period was hardly over before Irish Gaelic received another great blow, following the potato famine of 1847. With the terrible depopulation of Ireland, Gaelic literature began to fade, and the proportion of Gaelic speakers in Ireland dropped in three years from more than three-fourths to one-quarter. Later in the 19th cent., Irish scholarship came into its own again and resulted, through the efforts of John O'Donovan, Eugene O'Curry, Douglas Hyde, and Standish Hayes O'Grady, in a Gaelic literary revival. The principal figures in this new Gaelic literature were Canon Peter O'Leary, Patrick O'Connor, Patrick Henry Pearse, and Maurice O'Sullivan.

Modern Scots Gaelic

The connections between Gaelic Scotland and Gaelic Ireland were close until the rise of Presbyterianism in Scotland. Since the 16th cent., Scots Gaelic has had a literature of its own. The great event of modern Scots Gaelic culture is "the '45," when Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart) led the Jacobites in an ultimately unsuccessful uprising. There was a great burst of poetry that defied the repressive measures of Parliament and mourned the English triumph. The poet par excellence of the rebellion was Alexander Macdonald (MacMaster Alasdair); he was more original than Duncan Ban McIntyre, whose poems recall older forms and older themes. At the end of the century came James Macpherson's famous forgery Ossian, supposedly the work of a 3d-century Irish bard.

Gaelic in the Modern World

A sharp decline in technique and content was evident in the 19th cent. Some excellent writers of prose, however, were Dr. Norman Macleod and Donald Mackechnie. In the 20th cent. the best-known poets are Somalirle Maclean, George Campbell Hay, and Derick Thomson. A popular satirist and newspaper columnist was Flann O'Brien (Myles Na Gopaleen), whose novels, particularly At Swim Two Birds (tr. 1956), were popular in translation. In general Scottish Gaels have preserved their language and literary activity better abroad (for instance, in Nova Scotia) than the Irish, but at home Scots Gaelic is disappearing faster than Irish. Most of the monuments of Gaelic literature have been translated into English, as by Lady Gregory, Eleanor Hull, Tom Peete Cross, and (for Scotland) James MacGregor.

Medieval Literature

Until the 12th cent. A.D. most forms of writing in Gaul were in Latin. Old French emerged from the Latin vernacular of the south known as the langue d'oïl. Because of the French Crusades and military interests abroad (1050-1210), Old French became an international tongue, and a literature arose that reflected the attitudes and activities of the military, as in the Chanson de Roland (c.1100; see Roland). A tradition of epic poetry was developed by traveling minstrels, or jongleurs. Lengthy narratives were recited in groups of laisses, 10- to 12-syllable lines rhyming in groups of varied lengths (see chansons de geste).

Another early literary strain developed in the 12th cent. from the stories of saints and heroes and the Celtic romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Later, more refined romances and allegories include the philosophical Roman de la Rose and the witty Reynard the Fox. Marie de France and others created new forms, including the lai, animal fable, and fabliau (rhymed anecdotal piece). Many of these were based on themes from classical mythology. The works of Ovid and Aesop were especially popular sources, as was Arthurian legend.

French lyric poetry developed with the songs of the troubadours and the trouvères and from the more personal works of professional poets. Among the best-known lyric poets of the Middle Ages are Colin Muset, Rutebeuf, Christine de Pisan, Alain Chartier, Charles d'Orléans, and the outstanding poet of Old French, François Villon. The earliest French drama consisted of religious plays, the most familiar of which are the anonymous mystères (such as the Mystère d'Adam) of the 12th cent. The miracle plays of the 13th cent. include Jehan Bodel's Jeu de St. Nicolas (1200). By the end of the century secular and didactic pieces, many of them comedies and fantasies, were being performed by nonclerics. French prose literature began with the writings of the chroniclers and historians, among them Geoffroi de Villehardouin, Jean de Joinville, Jean Froissart, and Philippe de Comines, last of the major medieval historians.

Renaissance Literature

The late 15th and early 16th cent. saw the flowering of the Renaissance in France. Three giants of world literature—François Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne—towered over a host of brilliant but lesser figures in the 16th cent. Italian influence was strong in the poetry of Clément Marot and the dramas of Éstienne Jodelle and Robert Garnier. The poet Ronsard and the six poets known collectively as the Pléiade (see Pleiad) reacted against Italian influence to produce a body of French poetry to rival Italian achievement. The early 17th-century critic François de Malherbe attacked the excesses of the Pléiade; his zeal for the correct choice of words has marked French literature ever since.

The civil and religious strife of the later 16th cent. was reflected clearly in the works of the period, particularly in the poetry of Théodore d'Aubigné, Guillaume de Bartas, and Jean de Sponde. The greatest prose of the period was produced in the fiction of the ebullient Rabelais and in the magnificent essays of Montaigne. Under the stable and prosperous Bourbon monarchy Paris became the glittering cultural center of Western civilization.

Classicism: The Seventeenth Century

The 17th cent. produced the great academies and coteries of French literature. The elegant, controlled aesthetic of French classicism was the hallmark of the age: in the brilliant dramas of Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière; in the poetry and satire of Jean de La Fontaine and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux; in the prose of Blaise Pascal, Marie, marquise de Sévigné, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de La Fayette, and François, duc de La Rochefoucauld. The works of the ecclesiastic François de la Mothe Fénelon, the social philosopher Claude Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, and the satirist and classical scholar Jean de La Bruyère belong to this illustrious period as well as to the 18th cent.

These great writers vary enormously in their attitudes and interests but share a style that is lucid, polished, and restrained. They are, as a group, chiefly concerned with observing the subtleties of human behavior. Their works display qualities that have become permanently identified with the best French writing: wit, sophistication, imagination, and delight in debate.

From the mid-1680s French prose writers honed their critical facility as poetical and theatrical works waned in number and distinction. Ecclesiastical writing abounded and among the foremost figures in this field were Fénelon, Esprit Fléchier, Pasquier Quesnel, and Richard Simon. Major precursors of the Enlightenment of the 18th cent. were the philosophers Bernard de Fontenelle and Pierre Bayle.

Rationalism: The Eighteenth Century

The great French rationalists of the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason—François-Marie Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu—produced some of the most powerful and influential political and philosophical writing in Western history. The political and religious opinions expressed by the compilers of the Encyclopédie (completed 1765), led by Denis Diderot and the mathematician Jean d'Alembert, had great impact on French and foreign thought.

The period was also notable for advances in drama and fiction. Successful writers of tragic drama, other than Voltaire, include Antoine Houdar de La Motte and Buyrette de Belloy; the great writers of comedy were Pierre de Marivaux and Pierre de Beaumarchais. The French novel—Diderot and Marivaux contributed to its literary form—gained popularity with the works of Alain René Le Sage, Abbé Prevost, and Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and by the end of the century was among the foremost of literary genres. Another significant form of literature was the memoir; among the many writers of the period who excelled at this sort of autobiography were Mathieu Marais, Edmond Barbier, and Jean François Marmontel.

Romanticism, Realism, and Other Movements: The Nineteenth Century

The upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era were accompanied by new intellectual trends. Romanticism, greatly influenced by the philosophy of Rousseau, was heralded in the writings of Germaine de Staël and François René, vicomte de Chateaubriand. The principal figures of the Romantic period include Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred, comte de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, Gérard de Nerval, Prosper Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas, père, and Théophile Gautier.

The period that saw the transformation from romanticism to the realism of Gustave Flaubert was spanned by the writings of the great 19th-century novelists Stendhal, George Sand, and Honoré de Balzac. The romantics and realists alike wrote of the painful discovery of self-awareness and the torments of the inner life and, in differing degrees, concerned themselves with contemporary social mores. Hugo and Balzac both wrote much-imitated historical novels. Balzac's multivolume panoramic description of French society, entitled La Comédie humaine, stands as a unique literary monument to individual genius and a remarkable portrait of an era. The outstanding critic of the era was Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, whose literary essays were models of perceptive criticism.

In the later part of the century major writers of fiction included Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant, renowned for his short stories. The movement toward naturalism had its foremost French representative in the prolific novelist Émile Zola. The plays of Eugène Labiche, Émile Augier, the younger Alexandre Dumas, and later of Edmond Rostand won popularity in France and abroad. Major 19th-century French writers of history include Augustin Thierry, Jules Michelet, and François Guizot. Hippolyte Taine and Ferdinand Brunetière were outstanding critics, and Anatole France is considered the leading satirist of the age.

In poetry the Fleurs du mal (1857) of Charles Baudelaire had enormous influence, both at the time it was published and for many decades thereafter. In the later 19th cent. several circles, or schools, of literary figures became a prominent feature of Parisian letters: the Parnassians, led by Charles Marie Leconte de Lisle; the group around the Goncourt brothers; the symbolists, who were followers of Stéphane Mallarmé; and the decadents, who sought to glorify Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. The great poets of the age, including Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud, Péguy, and later Paul Valéry, worked for the most part outside such groups.

The Twentieth Century

In the 20th cent., as in the 19th, the novel was the chief form of literary achievement. Although the impact on fiction writing of such factors as the vast changes in political climate, the new concentration on modern culture, the great wars, the development of major publishing houses, the introduction of the paperback, and the evolution of the movies has been very great, French writing has maintained a concern for moral questions, individual liberty and character, and, above all, respect for language and form.

The novelists Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, and Pierre Loti explore the psychological explanation of human behavior. Colette, in her novels, stories, and journals, expresses penetrating insight into human nature. Marcel Proust, in his great novel cycle À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) makes subtle use of subconscious memory. Psychological examination continues in the works of André Gide. The cyclical novels of Jules Romains and Roger Martin Du Gard comment on society and morality. The surge of writing with strong Catholic inspiration include the works of François Mauriac and the novels of Georges Bernanos.

Jean Giraudoux's dramas are distinguished for exquisite style and treatment, as are the varied works of Henri de Montherlant. The novels of André Malraux, Édouard Peisson, Roger Vercel, and Joseph Kessel treat humanity's commitment to action, while the extraordinary and complex works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir developed a form of existentialist philosophy to express the pain of living. Existentialism was also a primary aspect of the early writing of Albert Camus.

In the mid-20th cent. the standard novel form was abandoned by many writers of fiction, including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Vercors, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Michel Butor, Roger Vailland, and Romain Gary. The post-World War II writers established a type of novel not greatly related to earlier works of fiction. The nouveau roman or new novel, sometimes called the antinovel, dispensed with previous notions of plot, character, style, theme, psychology, chronology, and message. By the latter part of the century it had created a tradition of its own and was widely considered to have diminished the stature of French fiction and to have forced a self-indulgent subjectivity onto the novel form.

Among the authors who continued working in a more traditional and still popular vein are the detective-story writer Georges Simenon and the novelists Françoise Mallet-Joris, Jean Cau, Boris Vian, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gilbert Cesbron, Jean Louis Curtis, Pierre Daninos, Henri Queffelec, and Roger Peyrefitte.

At the end of the 19th cent. the Théâtre Libre was founded, the first of a number of theatrical groups that invigorated the French stage. Alfred Jarry scandalized Paris with Ubu Roi (1896), a play now seen as ancestral to the theater of the mid-1900s. François de Curel, Georges de Porto-Riche, Jules Renard, and Eugène Brieux adapted the new social realism to drama.

Symbolism was fitted to the drama by Maurice Maeterlinck and later by Paul Claudel. Tristan Bernard and Henri-René Lenormand exploited psychoanalytical techniques. The experimental plays and films of Jean Cocteau reflect his astonishing versatility. Sartre and Camus brought to the stage a deep concern for man's predicament. The human situation is described as tragically absurd in the theater of Jean Anouilh, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco. The brilliant plays of Michel de Ghelderode were granted tardy recognition.

The early years of the 20th cent. proved a fertile time for poetic writing. Among outstanding works are the powerful verses of Paul Claudel, the experimental poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire, and the elusive imagery of Paul Valéry. In the 1920s André Breton issued a manifesto of surrealism, rallying around him Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, René Char, Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, and Elsa Triolet.

Poets who reacted against the force of surrealism include Francis Carco, Léon Paul Fargue, Robert Desnos, and Pierre-Jean Jouve. The poetry of Alexis Saint-Léger Léger is distinguished for its imagery. Among the outstanding poets of the decades after World War II are Jacques Prévert, Francis Ponge, Jules Supervielle, Raymond Queneau, Patrice de la Tour du Pin, Pierre Emmanuel, Jean Tardieu, Jean Follain, Georges Clencier, Andrée Chédid, and Kateb Yacine.

For literature written by English speakers elsewhere, see American literature; Australian literature; Canadian literature, English; New Zealand literature; and South African literature.

The Tudors and the Elizabethan Age

The beginning of the Tudor dynasty coincided with the first dissemination of printed matter. William Caxton's press was established in 1476, only nine years before the beginning of Henry VII's reign. Caxton's achievement encouraged writing of all kinds and also influenced the standardization of the English language. The early Tudor period, particularly the reign of Henry VIII, was marked by a break with the Roman Catholic Church and a weakening of feudal ties, which brought about a vast increase in the power of the monarchy.

Stronger political relationships with the Continent were also developed, increasing England's exposure to Renaissance culture. Humanism became the most important force in English literary and intellectual life, both in its narrow sense—the study and imitation of the Latin classics—and in its broad sense—the affirmation of the secular, in addition to the otherworldly, concerns of people. These forces produced during the reign (1558-1603) of Elizabeth I one of the most fruitful eras in literary history.

The energy of England's writers matched that of its mariners and merchants. Accounts by men such as Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, and Sir Walter Raleigh were eagerly read. The activities and literature of the Elizabethans reflected a new nationalism, which expressed itself also in the works of chroniclers (John Stow, Raphael Holinshed, and others), historians, and translators and even in political and religious tracts. A myriad of new genres, themes, and ideas were incorporated into English literature. Italian poetic forms, especially the sonnet, became models for English poets.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was the most successful sonneteer among early Tudor poets, and was, with Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, a seminal influence. Tottel's Miscellany (1557) was the first and most popular of many collections of experimental poetry by different, often anonymous, hands. A common goal of these poets was to make English as flexible a poetic instrument as Italian. Among the more prominent of this group were Thomas Churchyard, George Gascoigne, and Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford. An ambitious and influential work was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), a historical verse narrative by several poets that updated the medieval view of history and the morals to be drawn from it.

The poet who best synthesized the ideas and tendencies of the English Renaissance was Edmund Spenser. His unfinished epic poem The Faerie Queen (1596) is a treasure house of romance, allegory, adventure, Neoplatonic ideas, patriotism, and Protestant morality, all presented in a variety of literary styles. The ideal English Renaissance man was Sir Philip Sidney—scholar, poet, critic, courtier, diplomat, and soldier—who died in battle at the age of 32. His best poetry is contained in the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) and his Defence of Poesie is among the most important works of literary criticism in the tradition.

Many others in a historical era when poetic talents were highly valued, were skilled poets. Important late Tudor sonneteers include Spenser and Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, and Fulke Greville. More versatile even than Sidney was Sir Walter Raleigh—poet, historian, courtier, explorer, and soldier—who wrote strong, spare poetry.

Early Tudor drama owed much to both medieval morality plays and classical models. Ralph Roister Doister (c.1545) by Nicholas Udall and Gammer Gurton's Needle (c.1552) are considered the first English comedies, combining elements of classical Roman comedy with native burlesque. During the late 16th and early 17th cent., drama flourished in England as never before or since. It came of age with the work of the University Wits, whose sophisticated plays set the course of Renaissance drama and paved the way for Shakespeare.

The Wits included John Lyly, famed for the highly artificial and much imitated prose work Euphues (1578); Robert Greene, the first to write romantic comedy; the versatile Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe; Thomas Kyd, who popularized neo-Senecan tragedy; and Christopher Marlowe, the greatest dramatist of the group. Focusing on heroes whose very greatness leads to their downfall, Marlowe wrote in blank verse with a rhetorical brilliance and eloquence superbly equal to the demands of high drama. William Shakespeare, of course, fulfilled the promise of the Elizabethan age. His history plays, comedies, and tragedies set a standard never again equaled, and he is universally regarded as the greatest dramatist and one of the greatest poets of all time.

The Jacobean Era, Cromwell, and the Restoration

Elizabethan literature generally reflects the exuberant self-confidence of a nation expanding its powers, increasing its wealth, and thus keeping at bay its serious social and religious problems. Disillusion and pessimism followed, however, during the unstable reign of James I (1603-25). The 17th cent. was to be a time of great upheaval—revolution and regicide, restoration of the monarchy, and, finally, the victory of Parliament, landed Protestantism, and the moneyed interests.

Jacobean literature begins with the drama, including some of Shakespeare's greatest, and darkest, plays. The dominant literary figure of James's reign was Ben Jonson, whose varied and dramatic works followed classical models and were enriched by his worldly, peculiarly English wit. His satiric dramas, notably the great Volpone (1606), all take a cynical view of human nature. Also cynical were the horrific revenge tragedies of John Ford, Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, and John Webster (the best poet of this grim genre). Novelty was in great demand, and the possibilities of plot and genre were exploited almost to exhaustion. Still, many excellent plays were written by men such as George Chapman, the masters of comedy Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, and the team of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Drama continued to flourish until the closing of the theaters at the onset of the English Revolution in 1642.

The foremost poets of the Jacobean era, Ben Jonson and John Donne, are regarded as the originators of two diverse poetic traditions—the Cavalier and the metaphysical (see Cavalier poets and metaphysical poets). Jonson and Donne shared not only a common fund of literary resources, but also a dryness of wit and precision of expression. Donne's poetry is distinctive for its passionate intellection, Jonson's for its classicism and urbane guidance of passion.

Although George Herbert and Donne were the principal metaphysical poets, the meditative religious poets Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne were also influenced by Donne, as were Abraham Cowley and Richard Crashaw. The greatest of the Cavalier poets was the sensuously lyrical Robert Herrick. Such other Cavaliers as Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace were lyricists in the elegant Jonsonian tradition, though their lyricism turned political during the English Revolution. Although ranked with the metaphysical poets, the highly individual Andrew Marvell partook of the traditions of both Donne and Jonson.

Among the leading prose writers of the Jacobean period were the translators who produced the classic King James Version of the Bible (1611) and the divines Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, and John Donne. The work of Francis Bacon helped shape philosophical and scientific method. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) offers a varied, virtually encyclopedic view of the moral and intellectual preoccupations of the 17th cent. Like Burton, Sir Thomas Browne sought to reconcile the mysteries of religion with the newer mysteries of science. Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler (1653), produced a number of graceful biographies of prominent writers. Thomas Hobbes wrote the most influential political treatise of the age, Leviathan (1651).

The Jacobean era's most fiery and eloquent author of political tracts (many in defense of Cromwell's government, of which he was a member) was also one of the greatest of all English poets, John Milton. His Paradise Lost (1667) is a Christian epic of encompassing scope. In Milton the literary and philosophical heritage of the Renaissance merged with Protestant political and moral conviction.

With the restoration of the English monarchy in the person of Charles II, literary tastes widened. The lifting of Puritan restrictions and the reassembling of the court led to a relaxation of restraints, both moral and stylistic, embodied in such figures as the Earl of Rochester. Restoration comedy reveals both the influence of French farce (the English court spent its exile in France) and of Jacobean comedy. It generously fed the public's appetite for broad satire, high style, and a licentiousness that justified the worst Puritan imaginings. Such dramatists as Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley, and William Congreve created superbly polished high comedy. Sparkling but not quite so brilliant were the plays of George Farquhar, Thomas Shadwell, and Sir John Vanbrugh.

John Dryden began as a playwright but became the foremost poet and critic of his time. His greatest works are satirical narrative poems, notably Absalom and Achitophel (1681), in which prominent contemporary figures are unmistakably and devastatingly portrayed. Another satiric poet of the period was Samuel Butler, whose Hudibras (1663) satirizes Puritanism together with all the intellectual pretensions of the time. During the Restoration Puritanism or, more generally, the Dissenting tradition, remained vital. The most important Dissenting literary work was John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1675), an allegorical prose narrative that is considered a forerunner of the novel. Lively and illuminating glimpses of Restoration manners and mores are provided by the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn.

The Eighteenth Century

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 firmly established a Protestant monarchy together with effective rule by Parliament. The new science of the time, Newtonian physics, reinforced the belief that everything, including human conduct, is guided by a rational order. Moderation and common sense became intellectual values as well as standards of behavior.

These values achieved their highest literary expression in the poetry of Alexander Pope. Pope—neoclassicist, wit, and master of the heroic couplet—was critical of human foibles but generally confident that order and happiness in human affairs were attainable if excesses were eschewed and rational dictates heeded. The brilliant prose satirist Jonathan Swift was not so sanguine. His "savage indignation" resulted in devastating attacks on his age in A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729).

Middle-class tastes were reflected in the growth of periodicals and newspapers, the best of which were the Tatler and the Spectator produced by Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele. The novels of Daniel Defoe, the first modern novels in English, owe much to the techniques of journalism. They also illustrate the virtues of merchant adventure vital to the rising middle class. Indeed, the novel was to become the literary form most responsive to middle-class needs and interests.

The 18th cent. was the age of town life with its coffeehouses and clubs. One of the most famous of the latter was the Scriblerus Club, whose members included Pope, Swift, and John Gay (author of The Beggar's Opera). Its purpose was to defend and uphold high literary standards against the rising tide of middle-class values and tastes. Letters were a popular form of polite literature. Pope, Swift, Horace Walpole, and Thomas Gray were masters of the form, and letters make up the chief literary output of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Chesterfield. The novels of Samuel Richardson, including the influential Clarissa (1747), were written in epistolary form. With the work of Richardson, Fanny Burney, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne the English novel flourished.

Probably the most celebrated literary circle in history was the one dominated by Samuel Johnson. It included Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and James Boswell, whose biography of Johnson is a classic of the genre. Other great master prose writers of the period were the historian Edward Gibbon and the philosopher David Hume. Dr. Johnson, who carried the arts of criticism and conversation to new heights, both typified and helped to form mid-18th-century views of life, literature, and conduct. The drama of the 18th cent. failed to match that of the Restoration. But Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan rose above the prevalent "weeping comedy"—whose sentimentalism infected every literary genre of the period—to achieve polished comedy in the Restoration tradition.

Among the prominent poets of the 18th cent. were James Thomson, who wrote in The Seasons (1726) of nature as it reflected the Newtonian concept of order and beauty, and Edward Young, whose Night Thoughts (1742) combined melancholy and Christian apologetics. Anticipations of romanticism can be seen in the odes of William Collins, the poems of Thomas Gray, and the Scots lyrics of Robert Burns. The work of William Blake, the first great romantic poet, began late in the 18th cent. Blake is unique: poet, artist, artisan, revolutionist, and visionary prophet.

In prose fiction, departures from social realism are evident in the Gothic romances of Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, Charles Maturin, and others. These works catered to a growing interest in medievalism, northern antiquities, ballads, folklore, chivalry, and romance, also exploited in two masterpieces of forgery—the Ossian poems of James Macpherson and the "medieval" Rowley poems of Thomas Chatterton.

The Romantic Period

At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist, and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace.

In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a liberating aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworth's romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, "The Prelude" (1805-50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world.

The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. In Keats's great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wrote the greatest of the Gothic romances, Frankenstein (1818).

Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. Minor romantic poets include Robert Southey—best-remembered today for his story "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"—Leigh Hunt, Thomas Moore, and Walter Savage Landor.

The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground-breaking books on human, and women's, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary criticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary.

Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics.

The Victorian Age

The Reform Bill of 1832 gave the middle class the political power it needed to consolidate—and to hold—the economic position it had already achieved. Industry and commerce burgeoned. While the affluence of the middle class increased, the lower classes, thrown off their land and into the cities to form the great urban working class, lived ever more wretchedly. The social changes were so swift and brutal that Godwinian utopianism rapidly gave way to attempts either to justify the new economic and urban conditions, or to change them. The intellectuals and artists of the age had to deal in some way with the upheavals in society, the obvious inequities of abundance for a few and squalor for many, and, emanating from the throne of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), an emphasis on public rectitude and moral propriety.

The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. The novels of Charles Dickens, full to overflowing with drama, humor, and an endless variety of vivid characters and plot complications, nonetheless spare nothing in their portrayal of what urban life was like for all classes. William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for Vanity Fair (1848), which wickedly satirizes hypocrisy and greed.

Emily Brontë's (see Brontë, family) single novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is a unique masterpiece propelled by a vision of elemental passions but controlled by an uncompromising artistic sense. The fine novels of Emily's sister Charlotte Brontë, especially Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), are more rooted in convention, but daring in their own ways. The novels of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) appeared during the 1860s and 70s. A woman of great erudition and moral fervor, Eliot was concerned with ethical conflicts and social problems. George Meredith produced comic novels noted for their psychological perception. Another novelist of the late 19th cent. was the prolific Anthony Trollope, famous for sequences of related novels that explore social, ecclesiastical, and political life in England.

Thomas Hardy's profoundly pessimistic novels are all set in the harsh, punishing midland county he called Wessex. Samuel Butler produced novels satirizing the Victorian ethos, and Robert Louis Stevenson, a master of his craft, wrote arresting adventure fiction and children's verse. The mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis Carroll, produced the complex and sophisticated children's classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). Lesser novelists of considerable merit include Benjamin Disraeli, George Gissing, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins. By the end of the period, the novel was considered not only the premier form of entertainment but also a primary means of analyzing and offering solutions to social and political problems.

Among the Victorian masters of nonfiction were the great Whig historian Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, the historian, social critic, and prophet whose rhetoric thundered through the age. Influential thinkers included John Stuart Mill, the great liberal scholar and philosopher; Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientist and popularizer of Darwinian theory; and John Henry, Cardinal Newman, who wrote earnestly of religion, philosophy, and education. The founders of Communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, researched and wrote their books in the free environment of England. The great art historian and critic John Ruskin also concerned himself with social and economic problems. Matthew Arnold's theories of literature and culture laid the foundations for modern literary criticism, and his poetry is also notable.

The preeminent poet of the Victorian age was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Although romantic in subject matter, his poetry was tempered by personal melancholy; in its mixture of social certitude and religious doubt it reflected the age. The poetry of Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was immensely popular, though Elizabeth's was more venerated during their lifetimes. Browning is best remembered for his superb dramatic monologues. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the empire triumphant, captured the quality of the life of the soldiers of British expansion. Some fine religious poetry was produced by Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, Christina Rossetti, and Lionel Johnson.

In the middle of the 19th cent. the so-called Pre-Raphaelites, led by the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, sought to revive what they judged to be the simple, natural values and techniques of medieval life and art. Their quest for a rich symbolic art led them away, however, from the mainstream. William Morris—designer, inventor, printer, poet, and social philosopher—was the most versatile of the group, which included the poets Christina Rossetti and Coventry Patmore.

Algernon Charles Swinburne began as a Pre-Raphaelite but soon developed his own classically influenced, sometimes florid style. A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy, Victorian figures who lived on into the 20th cent., share a pessimistic view in their poetry, but Housman's well-constructed verse is rather more superficial. The great innovator among the late Victorian poets was the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. The concentration and originality of his imagery, as well as his jolting meter ("sprung rhythm"), had a profound effect on 20th-century poetry.

During the 1890s the most conspicuous figures on the English literary scene were the decadents. The principal figures in the group were Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and, first among them in both notoriety and talent, Oscar Wilde. The Decadents' disgust with bourgeois complacency led them to extremes of behavior and expression. However limited their accomplishments, they pointed out the hypocrisies in Victorian values and institutions. The sparkling, witty comedies of Oscar Wilde and the comic operettas of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan were perhaps the brightest achievements of 19th-century British drama.

The Early Twentieth Century

Irish drama flowered in the early 20th cent., largely under the aegis of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (see Irish literary renaissance). John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and Sean O'Casey all wrote on Irish themes—mythical in Yeats's poetic drama, political in O'Casey's realistic plays. Also Irish, George Bernard Shaw wrote biting dramas that reflect all aspects of British society. In fact, many of the towering figures of 20th-century English literature were not English; Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, O'Casey, and Beckett were Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, T. S. Eliot was born an American, and Conrad was Polish.

Poetry in the early 20th cent. was typified by the conventional romanticism of such poets as John Masefield, Alfred Noyes, and Walter de la Mare and by the experiments of the imagists, notably Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, and D. H. Lawrence. The finest poet of the period was Yeats, whose poetry fused romantic vision with contemporary political and aesthetic concerns. Though the 19th-century tradition of the novel lived on in the work of Arnold Bennett, William Henry Hudson, and John Galsworthy, new writers like Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad expressed the skepticism and alienation that were to become features of post-Victorian sensibility.

World War I shook England to the core. As social mores were shaken, so too were artistic conventions. The work of war poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the latter killed in the war (as were Rupert Brooke and Isaac Rosenberg), was particularly influential. Ford Madox Ford's landmark tetralogy, Parade's End, is perhaps the finest depiction of the war and its effects. The new era called for new forms, typified by the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, first published in 1918, and of T. S. Eliot, whose long poem The Waste Land (1922) was a watershed in both American and English literary history. Its difficulty, formal invention, and bleak antiromanticism were to influence poets for decades.

Equally important was the novel Ulysses, also published in 1922, by the expatriate Irishman James Joyce. Although his books were controversial because of their freedom of language and content, Joyce's revolutions in narrative form, the treatment of time, and nearly all other techniques of the novel made him a master to be studied, but only intermittently copied. Though more conventional in form, the novels of D. H. Lawrence were equally challenging to convention; he was the first to champion both the primitive and the supercivilized urges of men and women.

Sensitivity and psychological subtlety mark the superb novels of Virginia Woolf, who, like Dorothy Richardson, experimented with the interior forms of narration. Woolf was the center of the brilliant Bloomsbury group, which included the novelist E. M. Forster, the biographer Lytton Strachey, and many important English intellectuals of the early 20th cent. Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh satirized the group and the period, while Katharine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen captured their flavor in fiction.

Moved by the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and English policies of appeasement, many writers and intellectuals sought solutions in the politics of the left—or the right. Wyndham Lewis satirized what he thought was the total dissolution of culture in Apes of Gods (1930). George Orwell fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. The experience left him profoundly disillusioned with Communism, a feeling he eloquently expressed in such works as Animal Farm (1946) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). The poets W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis all proclaimed their leftist respective political commitments, but the pressing demands of World War II superseded these long-term ideals.

The Postwar Era to the Present

After the war most English writers chose to focus on aesthetic or social rather than political problems; C. P. Snow was perhaps the notable exception. The novelists Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Joyce Cary, and Lawrence Durrell, and the poets Robert Graves, Edwin Muir, Louis MacNeice, and Edith Sitwell tended to cultivate their own distinctive voices. Other novelists and playwrights of the 1950s, often called the angry young men, expressed a deep dissatisfaction with British society, combined with despair that anything could be done about it.

While the postwar era was not a great period of English literature, it produced a variety of excellent critics, including William Empson, Frank Kermode, and F. R. Leavis. The period was also marked by a number of highly individual novelists, including Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, and Muriel Spark. Anthony Powell and Richard Hughes continued to work in the expansive 19th-century tradition, producing a series of realistic novels chronicling life in England during the 20th cent.

Some of the most exciting work of the period came in the theater, notably the plays of John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, David Storey, and Arnold Wesker. Among the best postwar British authors were the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and the Irish expatriate novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett. Thomas's lyricism and rich imagery reaffirmed the romantic spirit, and he was eventually appreciated for his technical mastery as well. Beckett, who wrote many of his works in French and translated them into English, is considered the greatest exponent of the theater of the absurd. His uncompromisingly bleak, difficult plays (and novels) depict the lonely, alienated human condition with compassion and humor.

Other outstanding contemporary poets include Hugh MacDiarmid, the leading figure of the Scottish literary renaissance; Ted Hughes, whose harsh, postapocalyptic poetry celebrates simple survival, and Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet who is hailed for his exquisite style. Novelists generally have found as little in the Thatcher and Major eras as in the previous period to inspire them, but the work of Margaret Drabble, John Fowles, David Lodge stands out, and the Scottish writer James Kelman stands out.

Flourishing from the 12th cent. onward, the earliest literature of the Low Countries displays a strong French and somewhat weaker German influence in its vocabulary and literary style. Middle Dutch literature shows the same general characteristics as the contemporary vernacular literatures; thus the bourgeois spirit was expressed in the works of Jacob van Maerlant and in the Dutch versions of Reynard the Fox. Hadewijch, John Ruysbroeck, and Gerard Groote spoke the language of mysticism. By the 14th cent., chivalry and scholasticism had waned, and by the 15th cent. mysticism was transformed as moral piety. Among the best-known of Dutch medieval dramas are Mary of Nimmegen and the morality play Elckerlijk, closely related to Everyman.

The greatest Dutch figure of the Renaissance, Erasmus, wrote in Latin, but other humanists—Jan van der Noot, Dirck Coornhert, Hendrick Spieghel, and the painter and poet Karel van Mander—used vernacular. Reformation polemics were represented by the Catholic Anna Bijns, and the Protestant Philip van Marnix. With the establishment of the republic and the subsequent commercial prosperity, came the Golden Age of Dutch literature; this is the period of the masters Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft and Joost van den Vondel, of the homely verse of Jacob Cats, of the comedies of Gerbrand Bredero, and of the works of Constantijn Huygens.

After the 17th cent. Flemish and Dutch literature declined. Pieter Langendijk and Joseph Addison's imitator Justus van Effen, the novelists Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken, were the chief Dutch writers in the 18th cent. In the 19th cent. Dutch and Flemish literature expanded on European lines, with the novelists Jacob van Lennep, Anna Bosboom-Toussaint, Eduard Dekker, and the Belgian Hendrik Conscience, and the poets Isaäc Da Costa, Hendrik Tollens, Everhardus Potgieter, and the Belgians Guido Gezelle, Albrecht Rodenbach, Pol de Mont, and Nicolaas Beets.

The 1880s saw a reorientation of Dutch letters under foreign influence, especially under that of French naturalism and the English poets Keats and Shelley. By 1900, impressionistic themes were emerging in poetry. The new forces were seen in novelists and short-story writers, such as Louis Couperus, and in the Belgians Stijn Streuvels and Felix Timmermans. Among the better-known poets are Roland Holst, Pieter Boutens, and Herman Gorter in the Netherlands, and Karel van de Woestijne in Belgium. The successful dramatist Herman Heijermans has a significant place in 20th-century Dutch literature.

After the 1940s, the psychological novel came to typify Flemish literature. The physician Simon Vestdijk, perhaps the greatest Dutch writer of the 20th cent., wrote psychological novels that revealed the influence of existentialism. His contemporary Gerrit Achterberg explored similar themes of life and death in his powerful poems. The diary of Anne Frank is only the best known of a vast number of works that concern the Dutch experience during World War II. The character of Dutch poetry was altered after the war when Lucebert (Lubertus Swaanswijk), whose work was related to the internationalist CoBrA group, rejected rhyme and meter and introduced surrealist elements into his verse. In fiction, the works of postwar Dutch writers such as Anna Blaman, Alfred Kossman, and Adriaan Van der Veen reveal the influence of both the Nazi occupation and existentialism. Indeed, the existentialist influence is found even in fictional works of the 1960s in which writers such as Willem F. Hermans, Jan Wolkers, and Harry Mulisch express their overpowering sense of absurdity and despair.

Early Writings

The earliest literature of Denmark is preserved in the runic carvings on nearly 275 stone monuments erected to the Vikings c.850-1050. A number of these are written in alliterative verse. The Danish legends of the heroic period were preserved in the work of Saxo Grammaticus (fl. 12th cent.). With Christianity came the epic poetry of the scholastics, the legends of saints, and theological works written in Latin. The Danish folk song appeared in the 12th cent., stimulated by customs of knighthood and chivalry. Danish literature of the later Middle Ages, primarily in Latin, was formal and ecclesiastical; it included annals, chronicles, legends, and a few poems.

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The Reformation stimulated religious polemic and satire as well as the literary use of the Danish language. The Danish translation of the New Testament, completed in 1531 by the humanist Christian Pedersen (d. 1554), who also published an edition of Saxo (1514), greatly influenced Danish literature. In 1535 Hans Tausen (1494-1561) translated the Old Testament. From the Reformation also dates modern Danish drama, which was long a medium for religious moralizing. Fine poetry in the Renaissance manner was created in the early 17th cent. by Anders Arrebo, and baroque verse reached its zenith as rendered by the clergyman Thomas Kingo (1634-1703).

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Ludvig Holberg introduced the ideas of the Enlightenment in the 18th cent., and neoclassical poetry, the drama, and the essay flourished, following French and English models. German influence is seen in the verse of the leading poets of the late 18th cent., Johannes Ewald and Jens Baggesen.

It was maintained by the romantic school, fathered by Adam Oehlenschläger. A transcendent figure in Danish literary culture was N. F. S. Grundtvig; both he and Oehlenschläger influenced the poet and novelist Bernhard Ingemann. A more aesthetic ideal was promulgated by the dramatist and essayist J. L. Heiberg; two of his protégés were the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, renowned for his fairy tales.

Although S. S. Blicher may have been the first Danish realist, the actual breakthrough to realism was inspired by the internationally influential critic Georg Brandes and was reflected in the novels of J. P. Jacobsen, H. J. Bang, Karl Gjellerup, and Hendrik Pontoppidan and in the early verse of H. H. Drachmann. The novelists Karin Michaëlis and Gyrithe Lemche were among the many women writers, mainly realists, active by the late 19th cent.

The Twentieth Century

By 1900 a lyrical reaction was being led by the poet J. J. Jørgensen; impressionistic themes became important, but were never the sole fruit of Danish literary endeavor. Both before and after World War I Martin Andersen Nexø wrote in a context of proletarian realism, and J. V. Jensen employed elements of realism and fantasy alike. Fantasy was dominant in the tales of Isak Dinesen, while the theater was enlivened by the dramas of Kaj Munk and the brilliant stage technique of Kjeld Abell.

The period following World War II saw the passing of a number of great figures and the emergence of Martin Hansen, Aage Dons, H. C. Branner, Frank Jäger, Tove Ditlevsen, and Knut Sønderby as outstanding Danish writers. Leading writers of the following generation have included Ole Sarvig, Klaus Rifbjerg, Villy Sørensen, Benny Andersen, Inger Christensen, and Peter Hoeg.

Early Literature

Czech literature dates from the 10th cent. The legends of St. Wenceslaus, composed in that century, were written in Old Church Slavonic. Until c.1400, Czech literature consisted mainly of Latin chronicles (Cosmas of Prague, 1125) and of Czech hymns, tales of chivalry, and romances in verse. The 15th cent. witnessed a poetic flowering that paralleled increasing national consciousness. In 1394, Smil Flaška of Pardubice initiated modern realistic Czech literature with an allegorical admonition in verse, New Council. In a similar vein were the sermons of Tomáš Štítný (c.1331-c.1401) and the works of the peasant mystic Petr Chelčický (The Net of the True Faith, 1440-43).

The language reforms of John Huss helped to make Czech an effective literary language for the writers of the Renaissance, as in the works of the humanists, in the religious and secular writings of the Moravian bishop Jan Blahoslav (1503-71), and in the histories of Veleslavin (1545-99). The crowning glory of the age was the Kralice Bible, translated by the Czech Brethren and published from 1579 to 1593. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) brought wholesale destruction of Czech literary works followed by repression of national life.

In the 17th cent. the great educator Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský), like many other Czechs, worked in exile, and the language was gradually reduced to little more than a peasant dialect. In the late 18th cent. men like the philologists Josef Dobrovský and Josef Jungmann helped to rehabilitate writing in Czech. Jan Kollár led the Pan-Slavic revival in the early 19th cent., while Karel Hynek Mácha, considered the foremost Czech poet, expressed a Byronic romanticism developed further by the novelist BoŽena Nĕmcová and the poet Karel J. Erben.

The Nineteenth Century

Pan-Slavism and romanticism dominated Czech literature in the first half of the 19th cent. František Palacký highlighted Slavic scholarship. The 9th- and 13th-century Slavic texts produced by Václav Hanka (1791-1861) were proved spurious; they became, however, part of the Czech literary tradition and remained influential. In the later 19th cent., when the poetry of Svatopluk Čech, Jan Neruda, and Joseph V. Sládek and the novels of Alois Jirásek achieved fame, literature was oriented toward the intellectual and the bourgeois.

Modern Czech Literature

After 1890 realism gained force with the writings of the influential critic Thomas Masaryk. Proletarian and rural themes were developed, and writers such as Jaroslav Vrchlický, J. S. Machar, Petr Bezruč, and Otokar Březina won fame at home, while Karel Čapek brought Czech literature into the mainstream of world letters. In the period from 1918 to 1938 Czech literature was the most cosmopolitan of the Slavonic literatures; at the same time native themes were cultivated. A dominant trend was the movement away from the intellectual and the individual toward the abstract and the hedonistic. Jaroslav Hašek produced his classic war satire, The Good Soldier Schweik (4 vol., 1920-23), and Franz Kafka dominated the literary circles of Prague.

The German occupation saw the destruction of Czech literary art and the death of many outstanding figures. After World War II a reorientation of Czech writing toward Russia ensued, and socialist realism became dominant in Czech literature. Postwar novelists of note include Egon Hostovský and Jan Drda. Some relaxation of the strictures of socialist realism was evident in the 1950s and 60s. The postwar emigration produced a great flowering in Czech letters, including two writers with world reputations, Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký.

Early Writing and Literature

It is not known when the current system of writing Chinese first developed. The oldest written records date from about 1400 B.C. in the period of the Shang dynasty, but the elaborate system of notation used even then argues in favor of an earlier origin. From short inscriptions on bone and tortoiseshell (used for divination), characters standing for individual words have been deciphered and are traceable through many notations to modern forms.

Most of the oldest surviving works of literature were not written until the later centuries of the Chou dynasty (c.1027-256 B.C.). At this time was written most of what scholars of the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220) made into the canonical literature of Confucianism (which also included their own commentaries), although the current versions of these works, traditionally classified as the Wu Ching [five classics], contain interpolations. The Wu Ching, traditionally attributed to Confucius either as author or compiler, consist of diverse books. The Ch'un Ch'iu [spring and autumn annals] is an unadorned chronology of Lu, Confucius's native state.

The I Ching [book of changes] explains, often in allusive and ambiguous language, a system of divination, based upon the study of 64 hexagrams of whole and broken lines. The Li Chi [book of rites] describes ceremonials and an ideal Confucian state. The Shu Ching [classic of documents or book of history] contains historical records, many of them known to be later forgeries. While some of these works contain verse, the main collection of poetry in the Wu Ching is the Shih Ching [classic of songs or book of odes], made up of 305 poems. Written in simple rhyming stanzas, they tell of the peasant's life, of love, and of the wars of the feudal states.

During the Sung dynasty (960-1279) selections from the Li Chi and two other works were formed into the Ssu Shu [four books]; they were thought to embody the quintessence of Confucian teachings. They are the Ta Hsüeh [great learning] and the Chung Yung [doctrine of the mean] from the Li Chi, the Lun Yü [analects of Confucius], and the Book of Mencius (see Mencius). Other important early books include the Tao Te Ching [classic of the way and its power], traditionally ascribed to Lao Tzu, and the work of Chuang-tzu. These two books, which form the chief literature of Taoism, probably circulated in their present form from the 2d cent. B.C.

The early Chinese books originally appeared in the cumbersome form of strips of bamboo. Silk was substituted as a writing material in the 2d cent. B.C., and the invention of paper in the 2d cent. A.D. was responsible for a great increase in the number of books. The method of printing whole pages from wooden blocks was discovered under the T'ang dynasty (618-906) and was perfected and in widespread use by the 10th cent. This technology permitted an enormous increase in the number of copies available of any book.

Styles of Literature

Over time, the nature of the language in which the literature of China was written diverged sharply, producing two main styles of writing, one composed in a specifically literary language and the other in the vernacular. Both strands produced their own very different styles of literature, and both styles reflected their own characteristic language.

The literary style was exceedingly concise and was unmatched for its vigor, richness, and symmetry. Historical and literary allusions abounded, and finally special dictionaries were required for their elucidation. In poetry the relatively simple prosody of the Chou period was followed by systems of more minutely prescribed forms. The lines, which rhymed, had to be matched syllable by syllable in both part of speech and intonation. By the T'ang period the prosodic rules no longer suited the spoken structure of the everyday language; they continued to be observed in spite of changes in pronunciation. It is generally agreed that China's greatest poetry was written in the T'ang dynasty. Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, and Po Chü-i are masters of this period. In the succeeding Sung dynasty Su Tung-p'o was perhaps the foremost poet.

Translations of T'ang and Sung poetry strongly influenced the modern imagist school in English (see imagists). Chinese lyrics are generally very short, unemphatic and quiet in manner, and limited to suggesting a mood or a scene by a few touches rather than painting a detailed picture. Intellectual themes and narratives are comparatively rare. Many varieties of learned prose have also been written in China. Notable for accuracy and objectivity are the series of dynastic histories produced since Han times; the famous Shih chi [records of the historian] (c.100 B.C.) by Ssu-ma Ch'ien served as their model.

Chinese lexicography developed in response to multiplication of characters. The last of a great series of dictionaries (still in standard use) was produced in the reign of K'ang Hsi (1662-1722). So-called encyclopedias, actually extracts from existing works, have been occasionally compiled; one such work of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) ran to over 11,000 short volumes and appeared in three manuscript copies.

While the literati were cultivating polite literature during the T'ang and Sung periods, prose and verse of a popular nature began to appear. It was written in the spoken vernacular rather than in the classical literary language, and scholars regarded it with scorn. Springing from story cycles made familiar by professional storytellers, this vernacular literature first emerged as a full-fledged art in the drama of the Yüan dynasty (1260-1368).

The vernacular style later developed into the great novels of the Ming period that followed. Both the drama and the novel proved immensely popular. Thus the 13th cent. witnessed the emergence of the resources of the living language of the people. The vernacular novels, although they had their roots in the Yüan epoch, took shape gradually during the Ming era until they were finally given their finished form, perhaps anonymously by some talented traditional scholar.

An early and outstanding example of the novel is the San Kuo Chih Yen I (tr. San Kuo or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1925); it is set in the Three Kingdoms period (220-265) and recounts heroic deeds and chivalrous exploits. Another historical romance is the Shui Hu Chuan (tr. All Men Are Brothers, 1937), a picaresque tale of men forced by the venality of officials to become bandits. The Hsi Yu Chi (tr. Monkey, 1943) is an allegorical tale, full of the supernatural, concerning the adventures of a Buddhist pilgrim on a journey to India.

The Chin P'ing Mei (tr. The Golden Lotus, 1939) by contrast portrays domestic life and amorous intrigue; it is marked by realistic incident and the interplay of human relationships. The greatest Chinese novel is considered to be Hung Lou Meng (tr. Dream of the Red Chamber, 1958), an 18th-century work chiefly from the hand of Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in. With an unrivaled gift for subtle characterization and plot construction, the author recounts the declining fortunes of an aristocratic family.

The Early Twentieth Century

After the republican revolution (1911) authors turned away from the classical modes of composition, and many writers (notably Hu Shih and Lu Xun) advocated writing in the baihua vernacular. The change in Chinese education from preoccupation with the classic literature to scientific and technological subjects reduced mastery of the traditional literary skills as did the abolition of the civil service examinations for official posts, which had been based on a knowledge of the Four Books of the Confucian canon. The use of characters instead of an alphabet persisted, however; this made older writings accessible and permitted the Chinese, who speak widely different dialects, amounting to different languages, to communicate with one another. The use of baihua has proved especially effective in prose.

Translations of Western books frequently appeared in China, and the novelists of the republican period were greatly influenced by European writers. Among the most distinguished writers of 20th-century China are Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, and Ba Jin. During the 1930s and 40s several talented novelists came to the fore, including Mao Tun, Lao She, and Shen Ts'ung-wen, while modernist poets such as Ai Ch'ing experimented with Western-style free verse. Women writers who grew equally prominent during these decades include Ting Ling, Hsiao Hung, and Chang Ai-ling (Eileen Chang).

Literature in the Communist Era

Fiction during the first years after the 1949 Communist revolution depicted the great social transformations taking place. Party leaders advocated socialist realism, which was marked by strict adherence to party doctrine and by a narrow emphasis on the credible depiction of external reality; it inhibited writers' creativity and led to stagnation.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956-57) encouraged writers and other intellectuals to voice criticisms of party policy. Those who did so were soon punished during the 1957 antirightist campaign, when they were denounced and either imprisoned or sent to labor reform camps. Many, such as Wang Meng and Zhang Xianliang, were to remain confined for over two decades. Even harsher was the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, during which thousands of intellectuals were sent to work on distant farms. Some writers, such as Lao She, were either murdered or committed suicide.

Following Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping's consolidation of power in 1979, strictures on literary freedom were relaxed. The first stories from this period relate the nightmarish experiences of the Cultural Revolution—the "literature of the wounded." Despite a crackdown on "bourgeois liberalism" and "spiritual pollution," writing continued to flourish in the 1980s. Many works struggled with general social issues, such as official corruption and overcrowding; feminist issues were treated in novels by women writers such as Zhang Jie and Wang Anyi. Reportage literature, a hybrid of journalism and fiction, grew popular. Novelists experimented with stream of consciousness and other narrative techniques, while the Misty School of poets, exemplified by Bei Dao, Duo Duo, and Gu Cheng, developed a fusion of various modernist styles.

Han Shaogong, Ah Cheng, and others developed a "seeking roots" literature, characterized by rural settings, geographical and botanical descriptions, and the incorporation of local dialects and folklore. Zhang Xianliang, Gu Hua, and Can Xue were prominent among the regional writers who emerged, most notably from China's far west and south. After the massacre of prodemocracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square (June 4, 1989), many writers fled China, fearing government reprisals for their support of the democracy movement. Most continue to write in exile, publishing their work in literary journals in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas.

Except for the narratives of French explorers (such as Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Esprit Radisson) and missionaries, no notable writing was produced before the British conquest of New France in 1759. Since that time the inspiration for much French Canadian literature has been a concern with preserving an autonomous identity in a country dominated by the English language and the Protestant religion. Traditionally, there has been little contact between Canada's French and English literature. Until the 20th cent. French Canadian writers found their models mainly in writers from France and their themes in nationalism, the simple lives and folkways of the habitants, and the devotion to the Roman Catholic Church.

The first artistic expression of this spirit was F. X. Garneau's Histoire du Canada (1845-48), still the classic of French Canadian nationalism. Other historians, including Benjamin Sulte, Thomas Chapais, and L. A. Groulx, also placed their emphasis on pride in and protection of their French heritage. This school of thought inspired the first nationalist poet, Octave Crémazie and the Quebec school of poets, novelists, and historians. In 1861 they began a deliberate effort to create a national literature, with such French authors as Hugo and Lamartine as their chief models. The group included Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, J. B. A. Ferland, Louis-Honoré Fréchette, Pamphile LeMay, Abbé H. R. Casgrain, Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, and Nérée Beauchemin.

About 1900 a new group of writers developed, centered chiefly in Montreal, who tried to achieve the stricter technique and keener artistic perceptions of the Parnassians of France. These more sophisticated poets included Charles Gill, René Chopin, and Louis Dantin. Some writers of the new group, such as Émile Nelligan—considered French Canada's first native poetic genius—and Paul Morin, abandoned the national note for exotic subjects. Others, such as Albert Lozeau and Albert Ferland, found inspiration in Canadian nature. About the same time another movement began, led by Adjutor Rivard, aimed at preserving the purity of the French language in Canada. Influential critics included Camille Roy, Henri d'Arles, and the poet Louis Dantin.

In the novel, a rural romanticism was expressed in the works of Félicité Angers (Laure Conan). A more realistic fiction took impetus from Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine (1913), a novel of the peasants of the Lake St. John country. There followed a stream of fiction on habitant life in the backwoods, on the farms, and in the villages, by such native Canadians as Robert Choquette, F. A. Savard, Claude Henri Grignon, Roger Lemelin, and Ringuet.

Although some novels were set in cities and the notable author Robert Charbonneau explored the psychological defeatism of his characters, the realistic regional novel about the simple Catholic community remained dominant until the 1950s. Important poets since 1914 include Clément Marchand, whose inspiration is often religious; Alfred DesRochers, who writes of the life of the soil; and Robert Choquette and Roger Brien, whose romantic lyrics are eloquently individualistic.

Following World War II there was evidence of a new, less self-conscious spirit. Poets and novelists, trying to settle the language problem, declared that pure French should be standard, with the use of Canadianisms accepted wherever these served a purpose. Although it was still possible to detect the influence of France, in the mid-20th cent. much creative writing in Canada, as elsewhere, was characterized by experiment with subject matter and technique.

From the 1970s to the 90s a nationalist focus in the novel was generally replaced with irony, skepticism, and universalism, reflecting developments in both Europe and the United States. Among noteworthy postwar novelists are Herbert Aquin, Yves Beauchemin, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Jacques Godbout, Gilbert La Rocque, Antonine Maillet, and Jacques Poulin. Among the poets are Michel Beaulieu, François Charron, Anne Hébert, Paul Marie Lapointe, Rina Lasnier, Gaston Miron, Yves Préfontaine, Jacques Godbout, and Jean Guy Pilon, the last two founding the literary magazine Liberté in 1959.

Early Canadian Writing

Although Canadian writing began as an imitative colonial literature, it has steadily developed its own national characteristics. Because of the huge immigrations, first of New England Puritans from 1760 on and later of American Loyalists during the Revolution, Canadian literature followed U.S. models almost until the confederation in 1867. Before 1800 the rigors of pioneering left little time for the writing or the appreciation of literature. The only notable works were journals, such as that of Jacob Bailey, and the recorded travels of explorers, such as Henry Kelsey, Samuel Hearne, and Sir Alexander Mackenzie.

The Canadian Novel

The first Canadian novelist of note was John Richardson, whose Wacousta (1832) popularized the genre of the national historical novel. With The Clockmaker (1836) T. C. Haliburton began his humorous series on Sam Slick, the Yankee peddler. Historical novelists writing c.1900 included William Kirby, author of The Golden Dog (1877), and Sir Gilbert Parker, author of The Seats of the Mighty (1896). The novels of Sara Jeannette Duncan, such as A Social Departure (1890), were noted for their satire and humor. The Rev. C. W. Gordon (Ralph Connor) produced Black Rock (1898), a series of novels on pioneer life in W Canada. Animal stories became popular in the works of Ernest Thompson Seton, Sir C. G. D. Roberts, and Margaret Marshall Saunders.

Since 1900, Canadian novels have tended toward stricter realism, but have remained predominantly regional, and many writers have been women. Among the most prominent authors have been Lucy M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables (1908); Mazo de la Roche, well known for her series on the Whiteoaks family of Jalna; Frederick P. Grove, author of Settlers of the Marsh (1925), a novel of farm life; and Laura Salverson and Nellie McClung, novelists of immigrant and rural life in W Canada.

Margaret Atwood is probably the best-known modern Canadian author. Other important novelists during and after World War II include Morley Callaghan, Gwethalyn Graham, John Buell, Hugh MacLennan, Mordecai Richler, Malcolm Lowry, Ethel Wilson, Robertson Davies, Brian Moore, Margaret Laurence, Timothy Findlay, Neil Bissoondath, and M. G. Vassanji. Many of their novels have focused attention on Canadian city life, social problems, and the large problem of Canadian cultural division.

Essays and Poetry

The essayist Northrop Frye is noted for his systematic classification of literature, presented in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Stephen Leacock is well known for his humorous essays as well as for his scholarship. Other notable essayists include Sir Andrew Macphail, Archibald MacMechan, and Lorne Pierce.

Genuinely Canadian poetry was late in developing. In the 18th cent. Puritan hymnists, such as Henry Alline, and refugee Tory satirists, such as Jonathan Odell, took their models from American colonial or English neoclassical literature. Before the confederation of 1867 the only poets of note were Charles Sangster, the first to make use of native material, and Charles Heavysege, whose long poetic drama Saul brought him widespread acclaim.

Starting c.1880, the "confederation school"—C. G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott—began producing a large body of romantic poetry, describing nature and Canadian rural life. In 1905, long after her death in 1887, Isabella V. Crawford was recognized as an important poet; she was followed by Emily Pauline Johnson and Marjorie Pickthall. Other poets of the early part of the century included Wilfred Campbell, W. H. Drummond, Francis Sherman, John McCrae, and the greatly popular Robert W. Service.

In 1926 the prolific E. J. Pratt broke away from the romantic tradition with The Titans; his highly original and powerful epics place him among the foremost Canadian poets. Notable contemporary poets in the Pratt tradition include Kenneth Leslie, Earle Birney, W. W. E. Ross, Dorothy Livesay, and Anne Marriott. Other poets sharing the modern cosmopolitan tradition of the United States and W Europe are F. R. Scott, L. A. Mackay, A. M. Klein, P. K. Page, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, James Reaney, Margaret Avison, Phyllis Webb, Leonard Cohen, and Margaret Atwood.

The Colonial Period

Upon the discovery of Brazil, the Portuguese began to describe the wonders of the new land. Brazilian literature began with the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha announcing the discovery to the king of Portugal. That descriptive trend was continued in the 16th and 17th cent. in the works of European missionaries. José de Anchieta wrote in Portuguese about Brazil and is considered the father of Brazilian literature. The dualism of European tradition and New World feeling continued. Many consider the 17th-century Jesuit priest Antônio Vieira (brought to Brazil as a child) the true master of Portuguese prose in the classic style.

In the late 17th cent. the first native Brazilian writer of note, Gregório de Matos Guerra, wrote poetry satirizing the society of his time. During the 18th cent. poetic "academies" sprang up in various parts of Brazil. The most famous was in Minas Gerais; it included José Basílio da Gama, author of the epic poem O Uraguai (1769), and Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, best known for his pastoral love poem Marília de Dirceu (1792). This group had helped introduce revolutionary ideas from France into Brazil.

Independence and Nineteenth-Century Literary Movements

Independence from Portugal in 1822 fostered national feeling and ushered in the romantic era, which is generally dated from the appearance in 1836 of volumes of poetry by Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães, and by Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre. The two major Brazilian romantic poets were Antônio Gonçalves Dias, who glorified the indigenous people and the native soil, and Antônio de Castro Alves, a leader in the fight for the abolition of slavery. Alves's social awareness introduced a new dimension into the nascent "Brazilianism." A more introspective mood was created by Alvares de Azevedo. The romantic era also witnessed the birth of the novel in Brazil, notably O Guarani (1857) by José de Alencar and the later Iracema (1865).

A realist note was sounded by Manuel Antônio de Almeida in Memórias de um sargento de milícias (2 vol., 1854-55) and by Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay in his novel Inocěncia (1872). The works of the man generally considered the greatest of Brazilian writers, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, were in the same realist vein. His novels and short stories are noted for their psychological depth and classic purity of style. Contemporary with Machado de Assis were the Parnassian poets, headed by Olavo Bilac, but theirs was an isolated trend. Seven years before the appearance of Bilac's Poesias, Aluísio de Azevedo had published O Mulato (1881), a novel that dealt in naturalistic fashion with the Brazilian scene.

The Twentieth Century

In 1902 Euclides da Cunha wrote his masterly description of an uprising in the Brazilian northeast, Os sertões (tr. Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944). Canaan (1902), a pessimistic novel of ideas by José Pereira da Graça Aranha, appeared in the same year, and the children's literature of José Bento Monteiro Lobato also became popular. The strong nativist and sociological bias of many of these works was even evident in the modernismo movement. It began in Brazil as a poetic movement influenced by French symbolists and led by Mário de Andrade, whose prose work Macunaíma (1928, tr. 1984) made pioneer use of the vernacular; the movement was soon joined by other poets of stature, including Manuel Bandeira.

The social novel came into its own in the 1930s with the works of Graciliano Ramos, José Lins do Rego, and Jorge Amado. Their concern with the Brazilian interior has been continued by writers such as João Guimarães Rosa, whose poetic novel Grande sertão: veredas appeared in 1956 (tr. 1963). At the same time, the more subjective trend continued with, among others, novelists Rachel de Queiroz, Érico Veríssimo, and Clarice Lispector, poets Jorge de Lima, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Vinícius de Morais, and Cecília Meireles, and dramatists Nelson Rodrigues, Ariano Suassuna, and Alfredo Dias Gomes.

Reflecting the rise of military dictatorship, the themes of violence and repression, prominent in Brazilian literature since the late 1960s, run through the novels of Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Rubem Fonseca, and Nélida Piñon; through the poetry of Ferreira Gullar and Carlos Néjar; and through the plays of Chico Buarque and Gerald Thomas. The novels of Antônio Callado and Darcy Ribeiro depict the clash of political and social forces and the collapse of traditional ways of life.

The Nineteenth Century

Early attempts at producing literary works were rather gentrified, written in the English style for an English audience. A good example is the work of W. C. Wentworth, author of Australasia, an Ode (1823), which is minor and imitative. During the next few decades Australian writers began to discover at least their subject, if not yet their voice, with the interpretive nature poetry of Charles Harpur (1813-68) and Henry Kendall (1839-82) and with the novels of Henry Kingsley (brother of Charles Kingsley), who wrote about pioneer life. The bush ballad, begun by Adam Lindsay Gordon, flowered in the work of Henry Lawson (1867-1922) and A. B. ("Banjo") Paterson (1864-1941), whose Man from Snowy River and Other Verses (1895) includes the famous song "Waltzing Matilda."

Convict life was depicted in Henry Savery's Quintus Servinton (1830), but it was not until almost a century after the first prisoners arrived that they received their due, in Marcus Clarke's classic account of life in a penal colony, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874). Less powerful, but true to life in the bush, were the novels of Rolfe Boldrewood (pseud. of Thomas A. Browne) and James Tucker, whose Ralph Rashleigh (1844) was the first book to focus on Australia's unique combination of prison life, aborigines, and bushrangers. Other important 19th-century novelists were Miles Franklin (1879-1954), whose My Brilliant Career (1901) is often designated the first authentically Australian novel, and diarist-novelist Tom Collins (pseud. of Joseph Furphy, 1843-1912). Poets of note include Hugh McCrae (1876-1958) and Dame Mary Gilmore (1865-1962).

The Twentieth Century

The increasing industrialization of the early 20th cent. rendered the pastoral nature of most Australian literature anachronistic. The present century eventually produced greater sophistication and diversity among writers. Probably the most important Australian writer of the early 20th cent. was Henry Handel Richardson (pseud. of Ethel Richardson Robertson), whose autobiographical trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1930), presents a compelling portrait of Australian life. Richardson's reputation was matched at mid-century by Patrick White whose strong, somber novels, Australian in setting yet universal in theme, reveal the author's ambivalence toward his native land; White received the Nobel Prize in 1973.

Other notable 20th-century novelists are Brian Penton, Leonard Mann, Christina Stead (only one of whose novels is actually set in Australia), Arthur William Upfield (1888-1964), John O'Grady, Morris West, C. J. Koch, Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally, the aborigines Colin Johnson and Alexis Wright, and the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan. After emigrating to Australia in 1950, the English novelist Nevil Shute subsequently produced novels with Australian settings and themes. Remarkably, in a nation with such natural and human wonders, there has not yet been a major Australian poet. Current claimants, however, include R. D. Fitzgerald, Kath Walker, Judith Wright, J. P. McAuley, Kenneth Slessor, Vance Palmer, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

The first significant Arabic literature was produced during the medieval golden age of lyric poetry, from the 4th to the 7th cent. The poems are strongly personal qasida, or odes, often very short, with some longer than 100 lines. They treat the life of the tribe and themes of love, fighting, courage, and the chase. The poet speaks directly, not romantically, of nature and the power of God. The qasida survive only through collections, chiefly the Muallaqat, Hamasa, Mufaddaliyat, and Kitab al-Aghani. The most esteemed of these poets are Amru al-Kais, Antara, and Zuhair.

With the advent of Islam, the Qur'an became the central work of study and recitation. Extra-Qur'anic poetry underwent a decline from which it recovered in a far different form. The Qur'an supplanted poetry by becoming the chief object of study of the Muslim world. Poetry regained some prestige under the Umayyads, when al-Akhtal (c.640-c.710) and al-Farazdaq (c.640-732) wrote their lyric works.

Under the Abbasids (750-1258), Hellenic, Syrian, Pahlavi, and Sanskrit works became available in translation, and the Arabic language further developed as a vehicle of science and philosophy. Among the pioneers of Arabic prose were Ibn al-Muqaffa, the translator of the Indian fables of Kalila wa Dimna, and al-Jahiz (d. 868), an influential figure in the establishment of the belles-lettres compendia (adab) as a dominant literary theme.

The next great period of Arabic literature was a result of the rise of the new Arabic-Persian culture of Baghdad, the new capital of the Abbasids, in the 8th and 9th cent. Philosophy, mathematics, law, Qur'anic interpretation and criticism, history, and science were cultivated, and the collections of early Arabic poetry were compiled during this period.

At the end of the 8th cent. in Baghdad a group of young poets arose who established a new court poetry. A prominent court poet was Abu Nuwas. Asceticism, not yet developed into Sufism, evolved into a poetic genre with Abu al-Atahiya. Among the most popular of Arabic poets, Mutanabbi (915-65) wrote some of the most complex, and most eloquent, Arabic poems. The poet Hariri sought to combine "refinement with dignity of style, and brilliancies with jewels of eloquence." Abu al-Ala al-Maarri was an outstanding Syrian poet of great originality. The greatest mystic poet of the age was Omar Ibn al-Faridh (1181-1235).

The influence of India and Persia is seen in Arabic prose romance, which became the principal literary form. The greatest collection is the Thousand and One Nights. The major writers of historical and geographical works in Arabic include Bukhari, Tabari, Masudi, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn al-Athir (d. 1234), and Ibn Batuta. The foremost Arab theologian was al-Ghazali; Avicenna, the great physician, wrote on medicine. The central Asian scholar al-Faralsi, wrote fundamental works on philosophical and musical theory. In the field of belles-lettres, essays and epistles of great wit and erudition, known as risalas, were composed on subjects as diverse as science, mysticism, and politics. Chief practitioners of the genre include Ibn al-Muqaffa (d. 757), the unsurpassed al-Jahiz, and Ibn Qutayba (d. 889).

The Western center of Arab culture was Spain, especially Córdoba under the Umayyads. The Spanish Arabs produced fine poets and scholars, but they are less important than the great Spanish philosophers—Avempace, Averroës, and Ibn Tufayl. Their works became known in Europe chiefly through the Latin translations of Jewish scholars. Since 1200 in Spain and 1300 in the East, there has been little Arabic literature of wide interest.

During the 19th cent., printing in Arabic began in earnest, centered in Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus. Newspapers, encyclopedias, and books were published in which Arab writers tried to express, in Arabic, their sense of themselves and their place in the modern world. Simultaneously with a reaction against Western models in Arabic literature, the novel and the drama, forms never before used, developed. Notable 20th-century-early 21st-century writers in Arabic include the novelists Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, Abdelrahman Munif, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Yahya Hakki; the playwrights Ahmad Shawqi and Tawfiq al-Hakim; the poets Hafiz Ibrahim, Badr Shakir as-Sayyab, Nazik al-Malaika, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Mahmoud Darwish, and Adonis; and the short-story writers Mahmud Tymur and Yusuf Idris.

See also English literature.

Poetry

There are two types of Old English poetry: the heroic, the sources of which are pre-Christian Germanic myth, history, and custom; and the Christian. Although nearly all Old English poetry is preserved in only four manuscripts—indicating that what has survived is not necessarily the best or most representative—much of it is of high literary quality. Moreover, Old English heroic poetry is the earliest extant in all of Germanic literature. It is thus the nearest we can come to the oral pagan literature of Germanic culture, and is also of inestimable value as a source of knowledge about many aspects of Germanic society. The 7th-century work known as Widsith is one of the earliest Old English poems, and thus is of particular historic and linguistic interest.

Beowulf, a complete epic, is the oldest surviving Germanic epic as well as the longest and most important poem in Old English. It originated as a pagan saga transmitted orally from one generation to the next; court poets known as scops were the bearers of tribal history and tradition. The version of Beowulf that is extant was composed by a Christian poet, probably early in the 8th cent. However, intermittent Christian themes found in the epic, although affecting in themselves, are not integrated into the essentially pagan tale. The epic celebrates the hero's fearless and bloody struggles against monsters and extols courage, honor, and loyalty as the chief virtues in a world of brutal force.

The elegiac theme, a strong undercurrent in Beowulf, is central to Deor, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and other poems. In these works, a happy past is contrasted with a precarious and desolate present. The Finnsburgh fragment, The Battle of Maldon, and The Battle of Brunanburh (see Maldon and Brunanburh), which are all based on historical episodes, mainly celebrate great heroism in the face of overwhelming odds. In this heroic poetry, all of which is anonymous, greatness is measured less by victory than by perfect loyalty and courage in extremity.

Much of the Old English Christian poetry is marked by the simple belief of a relatively unsophisticated Christianity; the names of two authors are known. Cædmon—whose story is charmingly told by the Venerable Bede, who also records a few lines of his poetry—is the earliest known English poet. Although the body of his work has been lost, the school of Cædmon is responsible for poetic narrative versions of biblical stories, the most dramatic of which is probably Genesis B.

Cynewulf, a later poet, signed the poems Elene, Juliana, and The Fates of the Apostles; no more is known of him. The finest poem of the school of Cynewulf is The Dream of the Rood, the first known example of the dream vision, a genre later popular in Middle English literature. Other Old English poems include various riddles, charms (magic cures, pagan in origin), saints' lives, gnomic poetry, and other Christian and heroic verse.

The verse form for Old English poetry is an alliterative line of four stressed syllables and an unfixed number of unstressed syllables broken by a caesura and arranged in one of several patterns. Lines are conventionally end-stopped and unrhymed. The form lends itself to narrative; there is no lyric poetry in Old English. A stylistic feature in this heroic poetry is the kenning, a figurative phrase, often a metaphorical compound, used as a synonym for a simple noun, e.g., the repeated use of the phrases whale-road for sea and twilight-spoiler for dragon (see Old Norse literature).

Prose

Old English literary prose dates from the latter part of the Anglo-Saxon period. Prose was written in Latin before the reign of King Alfred (reigned 871-99), who worked to revitalize English culture after the devastating Danish invasions ended. As hardly anyone could read Latin, Alfred translated or had translated the most important Latin texts. He also encouraged writing in the vernacular. Didactic, devotional, and informative prose was written, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, probably begun in Alfred's time as an historical record, continued for over three centuries. Two preeminent Old English prose writers were Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, and his contemporary Wulfstan, Archbishop of York. Their sermons (written in the late 10th or early 11th cent.) set a standard for homiletics.

A great deal of Latin prose and poetry was written during the Anglo-Saxon period. Of historic as well as literary interest, it provides an excellent record of the founding and early development of the church in England and reflects the introduction and early influence there of Latin-European culture.

Colonial Literature

American writing began with the work of English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother country. Some of these early works reached the level of literature, as in the robust and perhaps truthful account of his adventures by Captain John Smith and the sober, tendentious journalistic histories of John Winthrop and William Bradford in New England. From the beginning, however, the literature of New England was also directed to the edification and instruction of the colonists themselves, intended to direct them in the ways of the godly.

The first work published in the Puritan colonies was the Bay Psalm Book (1640), and the whole effort of the divines who wrote furiously to set forth their views—among them Roger Williams and Thomas Hooker—was to defend and promote visions of the religious state. They set forth their visions—in effect the first formulation of the concept of national destiny—in a series of impassioned histories and jeremiads from Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence (1654) to Cotton Mather's epic Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).

Even Puritan poetry was offered uniformly to the service of God. Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662) was uncompromisingly theological, and Anne Bradstreet's poems, issued as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), were reflective of her own piety. The best of the Puritan poets, Edward Taylor, whose work was not published until two centuries after his death, wrote metaphysical verse worthy of comparison with that of the English metaphysical poet George Herbert.

Sermons and tracts poured forth until austere Calvinism found its last utterance in the words of Jonathan Edwards. In the other colonies writing was usually more mundane and on the whole less notable, though the journal of the Quaker John Woolman is highly esteemed, and some critics maintain that the best writing of the colonial period is found in the witty and urbane observations of William Byrd, a gentleman planter of Westover, Virginia.

A New Nation and a New Literature

The approach of the American Revolution and the achievement of the actual independence of the United States was a time of intellectual activity as well as social and economic change. The men who were the chief molders of the new state included excellent writers, among them Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. They were well supported by others such as Philip Freneau, the first American lyric poet of distinction and an able journalist; the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, later an attacker of conventional religion; and the polemicist Francis Hopkinson, who was also the first American musical composer.

The variously gifted Benjamin Franklin forwarded American literature not only through his own writing but also by founding and promoting newspapers and periodicals. Many literary aspirants, such as John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, and the other Connecticut Wits, used English models. The infant American theater showed a nationalistic character both in its first comedy, The Contrast (1787), by Royall Tyler, and in the dramas of William Dunlap. The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), by William Hill Brown, only shortly preceded the Gothic romance, Wieland (1799), by the first professional American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown.

Recognition in Europe, and especially in England, was coveted by every aspiring American writer and was first achieved by two men from New York: Washington Irving, who first won attention by presenting American folk stories, and James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote enduring tales of adventure on the frontier and at sea. By 1825 William Cullen Bryant had made himself the leading poet of America with his delicate lyrics extolling nature and his smooth, philosophic poems in the best mode of romanticism. Even more distinctly a part of the romantic movement were such poets as Joseph Rodman Drake, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who won the hearts of Americans with glib, moralizing verse and also commanded international respect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau stood at the center of transcendentalism, a movement that made a deep impression upon their native land and upon Europe. High-mindedness, moral earnestness, the desire to reform society and education, the assertion of a philosophy of the individual as superior to tradition and society—all these were strongly American, and transcendentalists such as Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott insisted upon such principles.

Men as diverse as James Russell Lowell, Boston "Brahmin," poet, and critic, and John Greenleaf Whittier, the bucolic poet, joined in support of the abolitionist cause. The more worldly and correct Oliver Wendell Holmes reflected the vigorous intellectual spirit of the time, as did the historians William Hickling Prescott, George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and John Lothrop Motley. Their solemn histories were as distinctly American as the broadly humorous writing that became popular early in the 19th cent. This was usually set forth as the sayings of semiliterate, often raffish, and always shrewd American characters like Hosea Biglow (James Russell Lowell), Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne), Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby (David Ross Locke), Josh Billings (Henry Walker Shaw), and Sut Lovingood (G. W. Harris).

Far removed from these humorists in spirit and style was Edgar Allan Poe, whose skilled and emotional poetry, clearly expressed aesthetic theories, and tales of mystery and horror won for him a more respectful audience in Europe than—originally, at least—in America. A number of seminal works of American literature were written during the 1850s. These include Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), depicting the gloomy atmosphere of early Puritanism; Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), which infused into an adventure tale of whaling days profound symbolic significance; and the rolling measures of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1st ed. 1855), which employed a new kind of poetry and proclaimed the optimistic principles of American democracy.

The Literature of a Split and a Reunited Nation

The rising conflict between the North and the South that ended in the Civil War was reflected in regional literature. The crusading spirit against Southern slavery in Harriet Beecher Stowe's overwhelmingly successful novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) can be compared with the violent anti-Northern diatribes of William Gilmore Simms. While the Civil War was taking its inexorable course, the case for reunion was set forth by President Abraham Lincoln in that purest and most exact statement of American political ideals, the Gettysburg Address.

Once the war was over, literature gradually regained a national identity amid expanding popularity, as writings of regional origin began to find a mass audience. The stories of the California gold fields by Bret Harte, the rustic novel (The Hoosier Schoolmaster; 1871) of Edward Eggleston, the rhymes of James Whitcomb Riley, the New England genre stories of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, the sketches of Louisiana by George W. Cable, even the romance of the Old South woven by the poetry of Henry Timrod and Sidney Lanier and the fiction of Thomas Nelson Page—all were seized eagerly by the readers of the reunited nation. The outstanding example of genius overcoming any regionalism in scene can be found in many of the works of Mark Twain, most notably in his Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Drama after the Civil War and into the 20th cent. continued to rely, as it had before, on spectacles, on the plays of Shakespeare, and on some of the works of English and Continental playwrights. A few popular plays such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rip Van Winkle were based on American fiction; others were crude melodrama. Realism, however, came to the theater with some of the plays of Bronson Howard, James A. Herne, and William Vaughn Moody.

The Turn of the Century

The connection of American literature with writing in England and Europe was again stressed by William Dean Howells, who was not only an able novelist but an instructor in literary realism to other American writers. Though he himself had leanings toward social reform, Howells did encourage what has come to be called "genteel" writing, long dominant in American fiction. The mold for this sort of writing was broken by the American turned Englishman, Henry James, who wrote of people of the upper classes but with such psychological penetration, subtlety of narrative, and complex technical skill that he is recognized as one of the great masters of fiction. His influence was quickly reflected in the novels of Edith Wharton and others and continued to grow in strength in the 20th cent.

The realism preached by Howells was turned away from bourgeois milieus by a number of American writers, particularly Stephen Crane in his poetry and his fiction—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and the Civil War story, The Red Badge of Courage (1895). These were forerunners of naturalism, which reached heights in the hands of Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, the latter a fiery advocate of social reform as well as a writer of Klondike stories.

Ever since the Civil War, voices of protest and doubt have been heard in American fiction. Mark Twain (with Charles Dudley Warner) had in The Gilded Age (1873) held the postwar get-rich-quick era up to scorn. By the early 20th cent. Henry Adams was musing upon the effects of the dynamo's triumph over man, and Ambrose Bierce literally abandoned a civilization he could not abide.

Since the mid-19th cent. American poetry had tended to empty saccharine verse—with the startling exception of the Amherst recluse, Emily Dickinson, whose terse, precise, and enigmatic poems, published in 1890, after her death, placed her immediately in the ranks of major American poets. A revolution in poetry was announced with the founding in 1912 of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, edited by Harriet Monroe. It published the work of Ezra Pound and the proponents of imagism (see imagists)—Amy Lowell, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Gould Fletcher, and their English associates, all declaring against romantic poetry and in favor of the exact word.

Meanwhile, other poets moved along their own paths: Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote dark, brooding lines on humankind in the universe; Edgar Lee Masters, who used free verse for realistic biographies in A Spoon River Anthology (1915); his friend Vachel Lindsay, who wrote mesmerizingly rhythmical verse; Carl Sandburg, who tried to capture the speech, life, and dreams of America; and Robert Frost, who won universal recognition with his evocative and seemingly simply written verse.

The Lost Generation and After

The years immediately after World War I brought a highly vocal rebellion against established social, sexual, and aesthetic conventions and a vigorous attempt to establish new values. Young artists flocked to Greenwich Village, Chicago, and San Francisco, determined to protest and intent on making a new art. Others went to Europe, living mostly in Paris as expatriates. They willingly accepted the name given them by Gertrude Stein: the lost generation. Out of their disillusion and rejection, the writers built a new literature, impressive in the glittering 1920s and the years that followed.

Romantic clichés were abandoned for extreme realism or for complex symbolism and created myth. Language grew so frank that there were bitter quarrels over censorship, as in the troubles about James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1919) and—much more notably—Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1931). The influences of new psychology and of Marxian social theory were also very strong. Out of this highly active boiling of new ideas and new forms came writers of recognizable stature in the world, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and E. E. Cummings.

Eugene O'Neill came to be widely considered the greatest of the dramatists the United States has produced. Other writers also enriched the theater with comedies, social reform plays, and historical tragedies. Among them were Maxwell Anderson, Philip Barry, Elmer Rice, S. N. Behrman, Marc Connelly, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Thornton Wilder. The social drama and the symbolic play were further developed by Arthur Miller, William Inge, and Tennessee Williams.

By the 1960s the influence of foreign movements was much felt with the development of "off-Broadway" theater. One of the new playwrights who gained special notice at the time was Edward Albee, whose later works again attracted attention in the 1990s. Important playwrights of recent decades who have imbued the modern world with qualities ranging from menace to a kind of grace in their surreal or hyper-real works include Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Tony Kushner.

The naturalism that governed the novels of Dreiser and the stories of Sherwood Anderson was intensified by the stories of the Chicago slums by James T. Farrell and later Nelson Algren. Violence in language and in action was extreme in some of the novels of World War II, notably those of James Jones and Norman Mailer. Not unexpectedly, after World War I, black writers came forward, casting off the sweet melodies of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and speaking of social oppression and pervasive prejudice. Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes in the 1920s and 30s were succeeded by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) in the 1940s and 50s.

Poetry after World War I was largely dominated by T. S. Eliot and his followers, who imposed intellectuality and a new sort of classical form that had been urged by his fellow expatriate Ezra Pound. Eliot was also highly influential as a literary critic and contributed to making the period 1920-60 one that was to some extent dominated by literary analysts and promoters of various warring schools. Among those critics were H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Malcolm Cowley, Van Wyck Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, Lionel Trilling, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks.

The victories of the new over the old in the 1920s did not mean the disappearance of the older ideals of form even among lovers of the new. Much that was traditional lived on in the lyrics of Conrad Aiken, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elinor Wylie. In the later years of the period two poets of unusual subtlety and complexity gained world recognition, though they had been quietly writing long before: Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. The admirable novels of Willa Cather did not resort to new devices; the essays of E. B. White were models of pure style, as were the stories of Katherine Anne Porter and Jean Stafford.

In this period humor left far behind the broadness of George Ade's Fables (1899) for the acrid satire of Ring Lardner and the highly polished style of Robert Benchley and James Thurber. The South still produced superb writers, notably Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty, whose works, while often grotesque, were also compassionate and humorous.

The tension, horror, and meaninglessness of contemporary American life became a major theme of novelists during the 1960s and 70s. While authors such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Hortense Calisher, and Philip Roth presented the varied responses of urban intellectuals, usually Jews, and John Updike and John Cheever treated the largely Protestant middle class, William Burroughs, Joyce Carol Oates, and Raymond Carver unsparingly depicted the conflict and violence inherent in American life at all levels of society.

Irony and so-called black humor were the weapons of authors like Roth, Joseph Heller, and Jules Feiffer. However, other writers, notably Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., expressed their view of the world as unreal, as mad, by writing fantasies that were by turns charming, obscure, exciting, profound, and terrifying. Many of these writers have been called postmodern, but the term encompasses a number of charactistics, including multiculturalism, self-reflection, and attention to new means of communication.

Although the poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti gained initial recognition as part of the beat generation, their individual reputations were soon firmly established. Writers of "perceptual verse" such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan became widely recognized during the 1960s. One of the most provocative and active poets of the decade was Robert Lowell, who often wrote of the anguish and corruption in modern life. His practice of revelation about his personal life evolved into so-called confessional poetry, which was also written by such poets as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and, in a sense, John Berryman. Accomplished poets with idiosyncratic styles were Elizabeth Bishop and James Dickey. To some degree, poetry has also become polarized along ideological lines, as shown in the work of feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Meanwhile, the bittersweet lyrics of James Merrill expressed the concerns of a generation.

The pressure and fascination of actual events during the 1960s intrigued many writers of fiction, and Truman Capote, John Hersey, James Michener, and Norman Mailer wrote with perception and style about political conventions, murders, demonstrations, and presidential elections. Post-Vietnam War American literature has called into question many previously unchallenged assumptions about life. In addition, writing in many prose styles, such novelists as Don DeLillo, Peter Taylor, William Kennedy, Richard Ford, Robert Stone, E. Annie Proulx, and T. Coraghessen Boyle have explored a wide variety of experiences and attitudes in contemporary American society. The literature of the 1980s and 90s also encompasses the work of African-American (e.g., Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor), Latino (e.g., Oscar Hijuelos, Rudolfo Anaya, and Sandra Cisneros), Native American (e.g., Louise Erdrich and N. Scott Momaday), Asian-American (e.g., Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan), and homosexual (e.g., Edmund Wilson, David Leavitt, and Rita Mae Brown) writers, who previously were often excluded or ignored in mainstream literature.

See also African languages; South African literature.

Oral literature, including stories, dramas, riddles, histories, myths, songs, proverbs, and other expressions, is frequently employed to educate and entertain children. Oral histories, myths, and proverbs additionally serve to remind whole communities of their ancestors' heroic deeds, their past, and the precedents for their customs and traditions. Essential to oral literature is a concern for presentation and oratory. Folktale tellers use call-response techniques. A griot (praise singer) will accompany a narrative with music.

Some of the first African writings to gain attention in the West were the poignant slave narratives, such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), which described vividly the horrors of slavery and the slave trade. As Africans became literate in their own languages, they often reacted against colonial repression in their writings. Others looked to their own past for subjects. Thomas Mofolo, for example, wrote Chaka (tr. 1931), about the famous Zulu military leader, in Susuto.

Since the early 19th cent. writers from western Africa have used newspapers to air their views. Several founded newspapers that served as vehicles for expressing nascent nationalist feelings. French-speaking Africans in France, led by Léopold Senghor, were active in the négritude movement from the 1930s, along with Léon Damas and Aimé Césaire, French speakers from French Guiana and Martinique. Their poetry not only denounced colonialism, it proudly asserted the validity of the cultures that the colonials had tried to crush.

After World War II, as Africans began demanding their independence, more African writers were published. Such writers as, in western Africa, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ousmane Sembene, Kofi Awooner, Agostinho Neto, Tchicaya u tam'si, Camera Laye, Mongo Beti, Ben Okri, and Ferdinand Oyono and, in eastern Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Okot p'Bitek, and Jacques Rabémananjara produced poetry, short stories, novels, essays, and plays. All were writing in European languages, and often they shared the same themes: the clash between indigenous and colonial cultures, condemnation of European subjugation, pride in the African past, and hope for the continent's independent future.

In South Africa, the horrors of apartheid have, until the present, dominated the literature. Es'kia Mphahlele, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Dennis Brutus, J. M. Coetzee, and Miriam Tlali all reflect in varying degrees in their writings the experience of living in a racially segregated society.

Much of contemporary African literature reveals disillusionment and dissent with current events. For example, V. Y. Mudimbe in Before the Birth of the Moon (1989) explores a doomed love affair played out within a society riddled by deceit and corruption. In Kenya Ngugi wa Thiong'o was jailed shortly after he produced a play, in Kikuyu, which was perceived as highly critical of the country's government. Apparently, what seemed most offensive about the drama was the use of songs to emphasize its messages.

The weaving of music into the Kenyan's play points out another characteristic of African literature. Many writers incorporate other arts into their work and often weave oral conventions into their writing. p'Bitek structured Song of Iowino (1966) as an Acholi poem; Achebe's characters pepper their speech with proverbs in Things Fall Apart (1958). Others, such as Senegalese novelist Ousmane Sembene, have moved into films to take their message to people who cannot read.

Body of literature that comprises those works (excluding the New Testament) written by Christians before the 8th century. It refers to the works of the Church Fathers. Most patristic literature is in Greek or Latin, but much survives in Syriac and other Middle Eastern languages. The works of the Apostolic Fathers contain the earliest patristic literature. By the mid-2nd century, Christians wrote to justify their faith to the Roman government and to refute Gnosticism. In the 4th and 5th centuries, Augustine of Hippo and others laid the foundation for much of medieval and modern Christian thought. Significant patristic authors include Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius, Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Ephraem Syrus (306?–373), St. Jerome, Theodore of Mopsuestia, St. Cyril of Alexandria (circa 375–444), St. Maximus the Confessor (circa 580–662), and Pope Gregory I.

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Literary work dealing in a usually artificial manner with shepherds or rural life, typically contrasting the innocence and serenity of the simple life with the misery and corruption of city or court life. The characters are often the vehicles for the author's moral, social, or literary views. The poet and his friends are often presented as shepherds and shepherdesses; two or more shepherds sometimes contend in “singing matches.” The conventions of pastoral poetry were largely established by Theocritus, whose bucolics are its earliest examples. Virgil's Eclogues were influential as well, as was Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender in the Renaissance. The idea of pastoral as meaning a simpler world that somehow mirrors a more complex one also appears in novelists as different as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lewis Carroll, and William Faulkner. Seealso eclogue.

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Body of written works produced to entertain or instruct young people. The genre encompasses a wide range of works, including acknowledged classics of world literature, picture books and easy-to-read stories, and fairy tales, lullabies, fables, folk songs, and other, primarily orally transmitted, materials. It emerged as a distinct and independent form only in the second half of the 18th century and blossomed in the 19th century. In the 20th century, with the attainment of near-universal literacy in most developed nations, the diversity in children's books came almost to rival that of adult popular literature.

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Latin American poetic genre that imitates the payadas (“ballads”) traditionally sung to guitar accompaniment by wandering gaucho minstrels of Argentina and Uruguay. By extension, the term includes the body of Latin American prose literature about the gaucho way of life and philosophy. Long a part of folk literature, gaucho lore became a subject of 19th-century Romantic verse, as well as prose that often explores themes of conflict between the old and the new.

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Romance language spoken by about 170 million people in Portugal, Brazil, and other former Portuguese colonies. The first literary works in Portuguese date from the 13th–14th century. Standard Portuguese is based on the dialect of Lisbon. Dialectal variation in Portugal is limited, but the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese are more extensive, including changes in phonology, verb conjugation, and syntax. The four major dialect groups are Northern (Galician, spoken in northwestern Spain), Central, Southern (including the Lisbon dialect), and Insular (including Brazilian and Madeiran) Portuguese.

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