21st European literature and its history

1. European Literature

2. Timeline of European Literature
• Ancient Literature and Medieval Literature
(800 BC – 1500 AD)
• Renaissance and Enlightenment (1300 – 1800)
• Romanticism and Realism (1800-1920)
• Modernism and Postmodernism (1920-Present)

3. Ancient Literature and Medieval
Literature
(800 BC – 1500 AD)

4. Ancient Period (800 BC – 500 AD)
● influenced mainly by Greco-Roman culture,
which became the basis for the Western
literature that we know today
● foundation of European literature: intellectual
and philosophical studies made by the Greeks
and the Romans

5. MAJOR KINDS OF LITERATURE
DURING ANCIENT PERIOD
● Tragedy
● Comedy
● Epic
● History
● Biography
● Prose Narrative
● Satire

6. MAJOR WRITERS DURING THE
ANCIENT PERIOD
● Greeks
● Homer
● Aesop
● Plato
● Socrates
● Aristotle
● Sophocles
● Romans
● Horace
● Virgil
● Ovid

7. Learn about It
Chantecleer
(A Tale by the Nun’s Priest from
The Canterbury Tales)
by Geoffrey Chaucer
Click Here

8. Learn about It

9. Analysis
Chapter II: The Story of Pandora
(from The Stories of Old Greece and Rome)
by Emilie Kip Baker
Read and analyze the following text and answer
the questions that follow.
Click Here

10. Analysis

11. Medieval Period (500-1500 AD)
● refers to works produced during the
Middle Ages (500 AD–1500)
● marked the emergence of three dominant
cultures Christianity, Islam, and the
Germanic invaders

12. MAJOR KINDS OF LITERATURE
DURING MEDIEVEL PERIOD
● Hymns
● Epic Poems
● Elegies
● Ballads
● Narrative Poems

13. Characteristics of Literature during
Medieval Period
● It is focused on different religious beliefs.
● It was concerned with the use of physical
force.
● It shows the lives of the aristocracy.
● It shows the inconsistencies of chivalry,
problematizing personal bravery versus
group needs, and the individual working
out his or her destiny.

14. Examples of Medieval Literature
● Beowulf
● The Song of Roland
● The Song of the
Nibelungs
● The Divine Comedy
● Canterbury Tales

15. Renaissance and Enlightenment
(1300 – 1920)

16. Renaissance Literature (1300-1600)
● marked by the rebirth of the Greco-Roman
literary tradition
● classical scholars, known as humanists,
revived and translated ancient texts
● humanists used the Greek and Latin classics,
along with traditional Christian thought, to
teach people about human life

17. Renaissance Literature (1300-1600)
● Humanism is the belief that people can
attain earthly perfection.
● Talented and creative individuals sustained
themselves through the system of
patronage.
● The greatest innovation of the time is the
printing press, invented by Johannes
Gutenberg in 1440.

18. THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT (1600-1800)
● byproduct of the Renaissance that birthed humanism
● could be summed up as the celebration of different
ideas
● birthplace of many great thinkers who put their ideas
into writing and made their thoughts available to
historians of this century

19. Learn about It
The Story of Don Quixote (excerpt)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (with Arvid
Paulson and Clayton Edwards)
Click Here

20. Learn about It

21. Romanticism and Realism
(1800 – 1920)

22. ROMATICISM (1800-1850)
● a literary movement against the aristocratic
culture that started in the late 18th century
● uplifts the characters from humble
backgrounds or the common man and
places importance on imagination and
emotion

23. ROMATICISM (1800-1850)
● prevalent form of literature: poetry
○ focused more on the individuality of a person
than on society
○ focused more on feelings as the central idea and
experience as it is considered “the language of
the heart”
○ showed more of the individual’s innermost
thoughts, dreams, and aspirations

24. REALISM (LATE 1800s-EARLY 1900s)
● the representation of reality
● presents the truth with all its flaws
● strives to present things as accurate
and with the least subjectivity as
possible
● focused on the fidelity of facts

25. REALISM (LATE 1800s-EARLY 1900s)
● draws on the commonplace and the daily struggles of
the common man
● focuses on documenting the real events and issues that
happen to ordinary people
● makes people realize that ordinary life could also be
meaningful
● focuses on groups of people in the hope of uncovering
who they really are and how others could relate to them

26. Analysis
Captain Burle (Chapter I)
Emile Zola
Read and analyze the following text, and answer
the questions that follow.

27. Learn about It
Frankenstein (Chapter I)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Click Here

28. Learn about It

29. Modernism and Postmodernism
(1920-Present)

30. MODERNISM (early 1900s – 1965)
● began in the early 20th century through
roughly 1965
● marked by sudden changes in man’s
perspective of the world
● challenged the prevailing order during its
time and focused on experimentation while
self-consciously breaking away from
traditional forms

31. Literary Techniques Invented
during the Modernist Era
● Imagism
● Stream of Consciousness
● An unreliable narrator

32. POSTMODERNISM (1965-PRESENT)
● shows a crisis of identity of the human being in
ethnicity and sexuality, as well as the struggle for
social and cultural acceptance in a hypocritical
society
● does not pretend to be new and original; rather, it
juxtaposes the old and the new to contextualize
the literary text in the readers’ minds

33. Characteristics of Postmodern Texts
● use of paradox or self-contradictory
statement
● use of fragmentation or
incompleteness, whether in form or
content
● the unreliable narrator

34. Learn about It
Araby
James Joyce
Click Here