History of European Literature

• European Literature 101 covers literature from Europe and its impact on global literature.
• Aims to Identify representative texts and authors from Europe.
• Seeks to situate texts in regional, national, and global contexts.
• Intends to appreciate the cultural and aesthetic diversity of world literature.

The History of European Literature

• Around 750 BC the Old Testament of the Bible was created, composed of 39 books written originally in Hebrew, it is religious and moralistic
• Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are thought to have been created through oral tradition
• Iliad and Odyssey are Chronicles of Achilles and Odysseus embodying war culture
• Greek drama blossomed during the Dawn of Common Era
• Romans preserved Greek culture modeling their empire and civilization after the Greeks
• Virgil wrote Aeneid, an epic modeled on the Iliad and Odyssey
• Ovid wrote The Metamorphoses, a very long narrative poem

Medieval Period

• Christianity and Islam rose during the Fall of the Roman Empire
• St. Augustine wrote The Confessions and City of God (spiritual pillars),
• Dante Alighieri composed the three-part comedy Divine Comedy envisioning a Christian soul’s journey in the afterlife
• War cultures produced epics such as Beowulf (Old English), The Song of Roland (French), The Song of My Cid (Spanish), and The Song of the Nibelungs (German)
• Medieval period had works related to King Arthur including Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
• Geoffrey Chaucer is considered the Father of English Literature and wrote "The Canterbury Tales”

Renaissance

• Humanism in the Renaissance emphasized ethics, critical thinking, rationalism, and empiricism over superstition
• Classicism emphasized form, simplicity, proportion, clarity, perfection, restrained emotion, and intellect
• Collapse of the Roman Empire led to the rise of England, France, and Spain
• Key figures from the era are Petrarch (Italy), Shakespeare (England), and Michel de Montaigne (France)

Neoclassical and Romantic Periods

• Neoclassicism was a Western cultural movement inspired by classical ideals of order and rational control
• Romanticism emphasized subjectivity, individualism and literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form

Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism

• Realism portrays reality by portraying mundane, everyday experiences of familiar people, primarily about the middle and lower classes
• Naturalism analyzed human nature through a scientific, objective, and detached perspective
• Modernism refers to movements like symbolism, expressionism, and futurism

European Literatures

• European literature is the largest body of literature in the world
• European Literature includes iterature in the Indo-European languages such as Latin, Greek, Romans, and Russian language

Latin Literature

• Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BCE) was a Roman orator who could express abstract and complicated thoughts clearly through speeches, like Pro Cluentio
• Virgil (70 BCE) was a Roman poet most known for Aeneid, an epic poem about Aeneas

Greek Literature

• Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey relating the heroic achievements of Achilles and Odysseus
• Sophocles (496 BCE) was a tragic playwright known for Oedipus the King, which marks Greek drama's highest achievement

Italian Literature

• Francesco Petrach (1304-1374) perfected the Italian sonnet, which was a major influence on European poetry and published in the Canzoniere
• Giovanni Boccaccio(1313-1375) wrote the Decameron, a classic Italian masterpiece, written in vernacular

Spanish Literature

• Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega are Spanish writers of Siglo de Oro (1500-1681)
• Miguel de Cervantes is known for the novel Don Quixote, one of Western Literature's most widely read books, the word "quixotic" originates from it's titular characters name
• Lope de Vega wrote 1800 plays during his lifetime, including cloak and sword drama about upper middle-class manners and intrigue, as an outstanding dramatist,

French Literature

• Gustave Flaubert, influenced the realist school; his masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857), marked the beginning of a new age of realism
• Guy de Maupassant is considered the greatest French short story writer, known for The Necklace and for writing realistic, objective stories

Russian Literature

• Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and his short story, God Sees the Truth but Waits and is considered as one of the world's greatest novelist
• Anton Chekov is a master of modern short story and Russian playwright, he wrote the Bet and the Misfortune

English Literature

• Body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of British Isles and Ireland from the 7th century to the present day
• Beowulf is epic poetry about a hero who saves the Danes from a monster and his mother, succeeds the kingship, and dies protecting his people from a dragon
• Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales - It compiles the stories of pilgrims, which consisted of people from all walks of life, during the Medieval era
• William Shakespeare (Bard of Avon) wrote 154 sonnets and, Romeo and Juliet, Macbet, King Lear, and Othello, Julius Caesar, he is the English national poet and greatest dramatist of all time.
• Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote How Do I Love Thee, it is one of the most quoted English love poem dedicated to Robert Browning