Literature Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
...ed. What Is Literature? Bloomington, IN, and London, 1978. A collection of essays on the problem of defining literature. Kernan, Alvin . The Death of Literature . New Haven, CT, 1990. Typical of many laments from the culture wars about how the literature has been devalued in an age of electronic media. Marino, Adrian . The Biography of “the Idea of Literature” from Antiquity to the Baroque . Translated by Virgil Stanciu and Charles M. Carlton. Albany, NY, 1996. Exhaustive survey of early notions of literature. Miller, J. Hillis . On Literature . London and...
Icelandic literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature of Iceland. Early Icelandic literature ( see Norse literature ) was written in Old Norse, also the language of medieval Norway. The distinctive narrative verse form, the rímur , flourished up to the nineteenth century. Modern Icelandic literature from the early nineteenth century was influenced by Romanticism and later by Realism. In the twentieth century some Icelandic writers including Gunnar Gunnarsson ( 1889–1975 ) wrote in Danish. Halldór Laxness won the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature . Katy...
Indian literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature of the Indian subcontinent and literary works by writers of Indian heritage. Ancient Indian literature (in Sanskrit) includes the sacred Hindu texts of the Vedas , the Upanishads , the Mahabharata , the Bhagavad Gita , and the Ramayana , and the Sanskrit plays and poetry of Kalidasa . The vernacular literatures in languages including Bengali, Malayalam, and Hindi have at times been overshadowed by the popularity of Anglo-Indian writing. Some writers, particularly of Bengali literature, have successfully moved between...
Australian literature Quick reference
Kenneth Morgan
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature produced in Australia in its early years of white settlement was linked to the broader tradition of English Literature, but writers reflected on the experience of living in colonial Australia in various ways. Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life offered a vivid portrait of Australia’s penal colonies, while the poetry of Henry Lawson, A. B. (‘Banjo’) Paterson, and C. J. Dennis drew upon life in the outback and on vernacular idioms. During the twentieth century Australian literature, whether poetry, novels, short...
Norse literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature Literature of Iceland and Norway including the sagas written between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries but set in earlier periods. It also encompasses the elaborately patterned skaldic verse of the tenth and eleventh centuries discussed in the Prose Edda of the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson ( c. 1178–1241 ) and the myths of the contemporary Poetic Edda . Katy...
Sanskrit literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The early Indo-European language Sanskrit was used in ancient Indian literature and Hindu sacred texts. The Vedas (from which the Vedic period is named) are the earliest works in Sanskrit. The Upanishads date from the later Vedic period. A simplified Classical Sanskrit succeeded Vedic from c. 500 bc , and is the language of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana . Katy...
Greek literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature Literature of the Classical (fifth–fourth centuries bc ), Hellenistic (third–first centuries bc ), and modern period. Extant early Greek literature includes epic songs, primarily the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer , and the poetry of Hesiod, including the Theogony . Pindar wrote odes and lyric poetry in choric form. The Classical period produced the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of their successor Aristophanes; the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; and the philosophical writing of Plato...
Spanish literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature Literature from Spain, and writing in Spanish from Latin America from the colonial period onwards. The early thirteenth-century epic poem Cantar de Mío Cid celebrates the Cid, Spain’s national hero. Chaucer may have known the Libro de Buen Amor ( c. 1330 ) of Juan Ruiz. Fernando de Rojas’s novel in dialogue, La Celestina ( 1499 ), is important to Spain’s literary history. The early chivalric romances were railed against by the hero of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote ( 1605–15 ); his exceptions include Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin of...
Irish literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature of Ireland, written in Gaelic or English. Early Irish writing includes the Fenian cycle of the legendary third-century hero Finn, the Ulster cycle, including the Tain-Bo-Cuailgne , and early lyric poems written in Old Irish in the fifth century. Major Irish figures in English literature include Jonathan Swift, George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize, 1925 ), and Oscar Wilde. The late nineteenth-century Celtic revival returned to early sources of Irish folklore. W. B. Yeats (Nobel Prize, 1923 ) was its figurehead. The Abbey Theatre (...
Japanese literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature of Japan. The earliest published Japanese works date from the eighth century: the myths and stories of Shinto Japan recorded in the Kojiki ( ad 712) and Nihongi (720), and the poetry anthology Man’yoshū (760), including early poems in the long chōka form. The Heian Period (794– 1185 ) produced the Kokinshū (905), an imperial anthology of Japanese poetry (mostly in the five-line tanka form), with an important editorial preface, and Murasaki Shikibu ’s Tale of Genjii ( c. 1001–15 ), an early novel of court life....
Latin literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature Literature of ancient Rome and the Roman Empire. From the third century bc the influence of ancient Greek poetry and drama was apparent in the work of Quintus Ennius and Plautus, and of Terence in the second century. The first-century ‘Golden Age’ of Latin literature ( c. 70 bc – c. ad 14 ) was heralded in the prose of Cicero and the poetry of Catullus and Lucretius. During the Augustan Age (the reign of the first emperor, Augustus, 27 bc – ad 14 ) the poets Ovid, Virgil, and Horace and the historian Livy flourished. The first century ...
French literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature of France and literary works by French-speaking writers. The medieval poetry of the Northern trouvères, such as Chrétien de Troyes , and Southern troubadours dates from the twelfth century, and influenced the thirteenth-century writers of the Roman de la Rose . The fifteenth-century poet François Villon was succeeded in the sixteenth century by the influential poet Pierre de Ronsard , the philosophical essayist Montaigne, and the exuberant comic fiction of Rabelais. The seventeenth century is notable for the tragedies of...
Canadian literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature of Canada, from the English, French, and indigenous cultures. The oral traditions of the indigenous First Nations, Métis , and Inuit cultures include poetry, and creation stories and histories centred on a trickster character; the American–Canadian border is often irrelevant. Print anthologies are mostly twentieth-century. The post-colonial European tradition is divided between French and English literary histories, the earliest texts in both being explorers’ travel narratives. De Gaspé’s L’Influence d’un livre ( 1837 ) is...
Chinese literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
... Dream of the Red Chamber (1760s). Lu Xun (pen-name of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936 ) is regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature in the post-imperial republic of China. The Cultural Revolution ( 1966–76 ) of Mao Zedong denounced many writers. Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li (b. 1972 ) addresses contemporary issues in China. The twenty-first century has produced China’s first two Nobel prizewinners for literature: Gao Xingjian ( 2000 ) and Mo Yan ( 2012 ). Katy...
American literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature of North America, including the oral traditions of Native American storytelling which preceded post-colonial written literature. Early autobiographies include A Son of the Forest ( 1829 ) by the part-Pequot William Apess; contemporary Native American writers such as N. Scott Momaday (b. 1934 ) and Louise Erdrich (b. 1954 ) draw on traditional stories. Early colonial writing includes the poetry of Anne Bradstreet ( c. 1612–72 ), explorers’ travel narratives, and Puritan and Revivalist autobiographies. Benjamin Franklin’s...
German literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature The literature of Germany and literary works by German-speaking writers. German lyric poets of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries―Minnesänger―include Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach , who also wrote the epic Parzival ; the thirteenth-century heroic epic, the Nibelungenlied , is anonymous. The Faust legend of the sixteenth century was later reworked by Goethe ( 1749–1832 ). The Sturm und Drang movement heralding Romanticism was epitomized by Goethe and Schiller ( 1759–1805 ); Gotthold Lessing ( 1729–81 ) provided a...
Russian literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature Literary works of Russia until the Revolution of October 1917 , and successively of the Russian Republic, Soviet Union ( 1922–91 ), and Russian Federation. Chronicles, hagiographies, and religious texts from the eleventh century were written primarily in Old Church Slavonic. Peter the Great’s Enlightenment reforms encouraged the use of vernacular Russian. Nikolai Karamzin ( Letters of a Russian Traveller , 1791–2 ) was credited with promoting a new language of feeling, and Romanticism influenced the work of Alexander Pushkin ( Eugene Onegin ,...
Italian literature Quick reference
Katy Hooper
Dictionary Plus Literature
...literature Literary works written in modern Italian, or the separate romance languages of Ligurian, Lombard, Tuscan, Venetian, Neapolitan, and Sicilian, including the twelfth–thirteenth-century Occitan poetry of the troubadours. Literary Italian developed from the fourteenth-century Tuscan known to Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. The Renaissance writers included the poets and playwrights Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto ( 1474–1533 ), and Machiavelli. Improvised commedia dell’arte flourished in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when Carlo...
Elizabethan literature Reference library
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (7 ed.)
...literature A name often applied to the literature produced in the reigns of Elizabeth I and the first Stuarts. See also Drab ; Golden...
American Literature Reference library
The Oxford Companion to American Literature (6 ed.)
...Literature ( 1929 –), journal of literary history, criticism, and bibliography, published quarterly by the Duke University Press with the cooperation of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language...
