Nondualty and Literature: An Idea of the Scope of the Project
I could include certain poetry, novels, plays here, but have not yet selected them. I would rather give an idea of the scope of the research that is required to find the nondual in literature. With that purpose in mind, I present the following listings:
English Literature
Shakespeare, Keats: http://nonduality.com/hl2573.htm
Literature Portal Topics
Epic Romance Novel Prose Poetry
Books Authors Awards Basic Topics
Literary Terms Criticism Theory
Middle-Eastern Literature
Ancient literature Sumerian literature Babylonian
literature Ancient Egyptian literature Hebrew
literature Pahlavi literature Persian literature
Arabic literature Israeli literature
European Literature
Greek literature Latin literature
Early Medieval literature
Matter of Rome Matter of France Matter of Britain
Medieval literature
Renaissance literature
History of modern literature
Structuralism Deconstruction Poststructuralism
Modernism Postmodernism Post-colonialism
Hypertext fiction
North American Literature
Canadian, Cuban, American, Jamaican, Mexican, African
American, African Canadian
South American Literature
Latin American literature Argentine literature
Brazilian literature Colombian literature
Peruvian literature
Australasian Literature
Australian literature New Zealand literature
Asian Literature
Asian literature Chinese literature
Japanese literature Korean literature Vietnamese
literature
Indian Sub-Continent Literature
Sanskrit literature
Indian literature Pakistani literature Assamese
literature Bengali literature Gujarati literature
Hindi literature Kannada literature Kashmiri
literature Malayalam literature Marathi literature
Nepali literature Rajasthani literature
Sindhi literature Tamil literature Telugu
literature Urdu literature Indian writing in
English
African Literature
African literature Nigerian literature
Moroccan literature South African literature
Swahili literature, African American African Canadian, African
(other nationalities)
Other Topics
History of theatre History of science fiction
History of ideas Intellectual history List
of years in literature Literature by nationality, Feminist
literature, Sexual orientation literature, Comic books, different
genres.
World Literatures:
* African (30)
* African-American@ (36)
* Albanian (3)
* American (1,000)
* Arabic (24)
* Armenian@ (9)
* Australian (197)
* Belgian (0)
* Bengali (7)
* British (1,928)
* Bulgarian (1)
* Canadian (1,085)
* Caribbean (80)
* Catalan (1)
* Chinese (49)
* Czech (6)
* Danish (5)
* Dutch (10)
* Egyptian (15)
* Estonian@ (8)
* Filipino (21)
* Finnish (41)
* French (35)
* German (11)
* Greek (2)
* Haitian (4)
* Hungarian (4)
* Icelandic (16)
* Indian (103)
* Indonesian (1)
* Iranian (16)
* Irish (146)
* Italian (18)
* Japanese (21)
* Jewish (10)
* Lao (3)
* Latin American (46)
* Lithuanian (2)
* Macedonian (1)
* Manx (2)
* Native American@ (15)
* Nepalese (1)
* New Zealand (15)
* Norwegian (40)
* Pakistani (47)
* Persian@ (16)
* Polish (5)
* Portuguese (2)
* Romanian (0)
* Russian (154)
* Scottish (194)
* Senegalese (0)
* Serbian (9)
* Slovakian (1)
* South Asian (6)
* South Slavic (2)
* Spanish (17)
* Sri Lankan (6)
* Swedish (17)
* Swiss (9)
* Thai (5)
* Turkish (5)
* Vietnamese (1)
* Welsh (10)
* Zimbabwean (6)
Argentina
Belgium
Brazil
Chile
China
Colombia
Cuba
Czechoslovakia
Danemark
Egypt
England
Ethiopia
France
Germany
Greece
Guatemala
India
Iran
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Korea
Mexico
Myanmar
Netherlands
Pakistan
Poland
Portugal
Russia
Somalia
Spain
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Tibet
Turkey
United States of America
Vietnam
From Norton Anthology of World Literature website: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nawol/index/section_index.htm
1 The Invention of Writing and the
Earliest Literatures
2 Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western Mind
3 Poetry and Thought in Early China
4 India's Heroic Age
5 The Roman Empire
6 From the Roman Empire to Christian Europe
7 India's Classical Age
8 China's "Middle" Period
9 The Rise of Islam and Islamic Literature
10 The Formation of a Western Literature
11 The Golden Age of Japanese Culture
12 Mystical Poetry of India
13 Africa: The Mali Epic of Son-Jara
14 The Renaissance in Europe
15 Native America and Europe in the New World
16 Vernacular Literature in China
17 The Ottoman Empire: Çelebi's Book of Travels
18 The Enlightenment in Europe
19 The Rise of Popular Arts in Premodern Japan
20 Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America
21 Urdu Lyric Poetry in North India
22 Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism in Europe
23 The Twentieth Century: European Modernisms
24 The Twentieth Century: After Modernisms
The following is from a very lengthy web
page at http://mason.gmu.edu/~ayadav/anthologies
Multicultural and World Literature Anthologies / Alok
Yadav, comp.
Last update: 31 Jan. 2008
The purpose of this list is to give interested individuals a
sense of some of the primary texts available in English or in
English translation for the teaching and study of world
literature. (A very few anthologies consisting of translations
into other languages are also included.) Wherever possible, I
have listed the authors and/or works included in an anthology, so
one can search for particular authors or works by name to check
their availability in English. (Click on the Edit
button on your web browser and then on Find (on this
page), or its equivalent, to search for particular items in
this document: this procedure works fine with Internet Explorer
and Firefox, but, apparently, not with Netscape.) Of course,
book-length individual works by authors from around the world are
available in stand-alone translations and these are not included
here; both single-author and dual-author collections are also
generally excluded. It would be impractical to try to include
such works. Where available, bibliographies of translations into
English of various literatures of the world are included at the
start of each section and these can help one locate such
stand-alone translations. I have also, on occasion, included
studies of translations of particular bodies of literature into
English with these bibliographic titles.
As the previous paragraph suggests, the focus of this resource
list is on literatures originally written in languages other than
English. Anthologies of works originally composed in English are
also covered, but with a focus on Anglophone literatures from
outside the United States and the United Kingdom. I have,
however, listed anthologies of US literature that have a
multicultural or minority literature emphasis in Part III.
Anthologies of classics (i.e., the European
literature of antiquity) in English translation are, at present,
not covered in this bibliography.
Needless to say, given the huge terrain involved, this is an
ongoing project. I update it periodically: currently it consists
of about 1425 items. If you would like to suggest additions or
corrections, please contact me via email. (My thanks to those who
have helped me in this regard.)
I. Anthologies of World Literature (or general international
anthologies) [47]
II. Anthologies of Literature from Particular Areas of the World
(i.e., outside the U.S. and Britain)
1. Latin America and the Americas in general [58]
2. The Caribbean [31]
3. Subsaharan Africa and Africa in general [106]
(plus subsection on African diasporic writing) [7]
4. North Africa and the Middle East [49]
5. Central Asia (including Tibet) [3]
6. South Asia [131]
7. Southeast Asia [87]
8. East Asia [356]
General East Asia [5]
China and Taiwan [188]
Japan [49]
Korea [114]
9. Australia and New Zealand [10]
10. Pacific Islands (incl. Philippines and Fiji) [9]
11. Eastern Europe and Russia (including Baltic countries) [204]
General Eastern Europe
Russia/Soviet Union
Ukraine
Poland
Baltic Countries [Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania]
Czech and Slovak
Hungary
Romania
Bulgaria
Yugoslavia [Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina]
Albania
12. Canada [54]
13. Ireland and General Celtic [55]
14. Black British writing [7]
15. Commonwealth in general / General anglophone [16]
16. General francophone [2]
17. General hispanic and lusophone [5]
18. General Asian or Oriental [18]
19. Miscellaneous (mostly Western European selections) [162]
IIIa. Multicultural Anthologies of U.S. Literature [17]
and
IIIb. Anthologies of Particular Cultural Traditions within the
United States :
Native American Literature [32]
African American Literature [21]
Asian American Literature [11]
Latina/o Literature [41]
Arab American (including Iranian American) [1]
Other Ethnic American Literatures [2]
A World Literature Timeline
http://sybilisticism.tripod.com/worldliteraturetimeline.htm
Invention of Writing and Earliest Literature [Beginnings to 100
A.D.]
1. Writing was not invented for the purpose of preserving
literature; the earliest written documents contain commercial,
administrative, political, and legal information, and were
created by the first "advanced" civilizations in an
area that Westerners commonly call the Middle East.
2. The oldest writing was pictographic, meaning that the sign for
an object was written to resemble the object itself; later,
hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts were invented to record more
complicated information.
3. Begun in 2700 B.C. and written down about 2000 B.C., the first
great heroic narrative of world literature, Gilgamesh, nearly
vanished from memory when it was not translated from cuneiform
languages into the new alphabets that replaced them.
4. Though the absence of written signs for vowels can confuse
some readers, the consonantal script developed by the Hebrews
ushered in a new form of writing that could be composed without
special artistic skills and read without advanced training.
5. With their return to Palestine in 539 B.C., the Hebrews
rebuilt the Temple and created the canonical version of the
Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible.
6. As the stories in the Bible expound, unlike polytheistic
religions in which gods often battle among themselves for control
over humankind, the sole resistance to the Hebrew God is
humankind itself.
Ancient Greece [Beginnings to 100 A.D.]
1. Though the origin of the Hellenes, or ancient Greeks, is
unknown, their language clearly belongs to the Indo-European
family.
2. By serving as a basis for education, the Iliad and Odyssey
played a role in the development of Greek civilization that is
equivalent to the role that the Torah had played in Palestine.
3. The Greeks who established colonies in Asia adapted their
language to the Phoenician writing system, adding signs for
vowels to change it from a consonantal to an alphabetic system.
4. Before its defeat to Sparta, Athens developed democratic
institutions to maintain the delicate balance between the freedom
of the individual and the demands of the state.
5. Unlike the Sophists, Socrates proposed a method of teaching
that was dialectic rather than didactic; his means of approaching
"truth" through questions and answers revolutionized
Greek philosophy.
6. The basis for Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was an immense poetic
reserve created by generations of singers who lived before him.
7. Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey offers easy answers;
questions about the nature of aggression and violence are left
unanswered, and questions about human suffering and the waste
generated by war are left unresolved.
8. Greek comedy and tragedy developed out of choral performances
in celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine and mystic ecstasy.
Poetry and Thought in China [Beginnings to 100 A.D.]
1. Chinese civilization first developed in the Yellow River
basin.
2. The Classic of Poetry is a lyric poetry collection that stands
at the beginning of the Chinese literary tradition.
3. The fusion of ethical thought and idealized Chou traditions
associated with Confucius were recorded in the Analects by
Confucius's disciples following his death.
4. The Chuang Tzu offers philosophical meditations in a multitude
of forms, ranging from jokes and parables to intricate
philosophical arguments.
5. During the period of the Warring States, Ssu-ma Ch'ien
produced the popular Historical Records chronicling the lives of
ruling families and dynasties in a comprehensive history of China
up to the time of Emperor Wu's reign.
6. The end of ancient China is often linked with the rise of the
draconian ruler Ch'in Shih-huang.
Indias Heroic Age [Beginnings to 100 A.D.]
1. The ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity of India's
billion people has given rise to a diverse written and oral
literary tradition that evolved over 3,500 years.
2. The Vedas are the primary scriptures of Hinduism and consist
of four books of sacred hymns that are typically chanted by
priests at ceremonies marking rites of passage.
3. The Upanisads argue that the soul is a manifestation of a
single divine essence; release comes from understanding the basic
unity between the self and the universe.
4. Two epics that express the core values of Hinduism are the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
5. Dharma is the guiding principle of human conduct and preserves
the social, moral, and cosmic integrity of the universe. It
refers to sacred duties and righteous conduct, and is related to
three other spheres that collectively govern an ideal life: artha
(wealth, profit, and political power); kama (love, sensuality);
moksa (release, liberation).
6. The belief that all beings are responsible for their own
actions and their own suffering is known as karma.
7. Because Buddhism was a more egalitarian and populist religion,
it initially gained a following among women, artisans, merchants,
and individuals to whom the ritualistic and hierarchical nature
of Hinduism seemed constraining.
8. Because Hinduism and its important texts such as the
Bhagavad-Gita were able to synthesize tenets and ideas from the
other religions, it was able to triumph in India.
9. The idea that moral and spiritual conquest is superior to
conquest by the sword is an enduring motif of the time and one
that was publicly endorsed by Emperor Asoka.
The Roman Empire [Beginnings to 100 A.D.]
1. With its military victories in North Africa, Spain, Greece,
and Asia Minor, the social, cultural, and economic life of Rome
changed profoundly.
2. After the fall of the Roman empire, the concept of a
world-state was appropriated by the medieval Church, which ruled
from the same center, Rome, and laid claim to a spiritual
authority as great as the secular authority it succeeded.
3. Literature in Latin began with a translation of the Greek
Odyssey and continued to be modeled after Greek sources until it
became Christian.
4. The lyric poems that Catullus wrote about his love affair with
the married woman he called Lesbia range in tone from passionate
to despairing to almost obscene.
5. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Virgil's Aeneid
combines the themes of the Homeric epics: the wanderer in search
of a home from the Iliad, and the hero at war from the Odyssey.
6. Ovid's extraordinary subtlety and psychological depth make his
poetry second only to Virgil's for its influence on Western poets
and writers of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.
7. Probably written by Petronius, and probably written during the
principate of Nero, the Satyricon is a satirical work about the
pragmatism and materialism of the Roman empire that would soon be
supplanted by Christianity.
Roman Empire -> Christian Europe [100 A.D. to 1500]
1. The life of the Hebrew prophet Jesus ended in the agony of the
crucifixion by a Roman governor, but his teachings were written
down in the Greek language and became the sacred texts of the
Christian church.
2. The teachings of Jesus were revolutionary in terms of Greek
and Roman feeling, as well as the Hebrew religious tradition.
3. Until Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, declaring
tolerance for all religions, in 313, the Christian church was
often persecuted by imperial authorities, particularly under the
rule of emperors Nero, Marcus Aurelius, and Diocletian.
4. The four Gospels were collected with other documents to form
the New Testament, which Pope Damasus had translated from Greek
to Latin by the scholar Jerome in 393405.
5. In his Confessions, Augustine sets down the story of his early
life for the benefit of others, combining the intellectual
tradition of the ancient world and the religious feeling that
would come to be characteristic of the Middle Ages.
Indias Classical Age [100 A.D. to 1500]
1. During the rule of the Guptas in ancient India, great
achievements were made in mathematics, logic, astronomy,
literature, and the fine arts.
2. Classical Sanskrit literature deals extensively with courtly
culture and life. Aiming to evoke aesthetic responses, many of
the works admitted into the literary canon were poetic works
written and performed by learned poets (kavi) who were under the
patronage of kings. A highly stylized form of poetry, kavya
literature consists of four main genresthe court epic,
short lyric, narrative, and drama.
3. In contrast to the elegant and formal works of the kavya genre
are two important collections of tales that have influenced tales
around the worldthe Pańcatantra and the Kathasaritsagara.
4. Women in classical literature are rarely portrayed as
one-dimensional characters who are victims of circumstance.
5. The kavya tradition is concerned with the universe and ideals.
Heroes and heroines are rarely individuals; rather, they
represent "universal" types.
Chinas Middle Period [100 A.D. to 1500]
1. The "middle period" of Chinese literature occupies a
central place in that nation's cultural history; to many it is
the era during which Chinese thought and letters achieved its
highest form.
2. During China's "middle period," Confucianism
declined in importance; Taoism and Buddhism in fact began to
acquire a more important status. With an emphasis on personal
salvation, they offered an alternative to the Confucian ideals of
social and ethical collective interests.
3. Because of the way that it was integrated into life during
this period, the T'ang Dynasty is often considered a period when
poetry flourished.
4. Thanks to the development of printing, the vernacular
traditions emphasizing storytelling have coexisted and evolved
along with classical literature up to present times.
Islam [100 A.D. to 1500]
1. God's revelations were first received around 610 by the
prophet Muhammad, whose followers later collected them into the
Koran, which became the basis for a new religion and community
known today as Islam.
2. Though most of the pre-Islamic literature of Arabia was
written in verse, prose became a popular vehicle for the
dissemination of religious learning.
3. As its title "the Recitation" suggests, the Koran
was made to be heard and recited; because it is literally the
word of God, Muslims do not accept the Koran in translation from
Arabic.
4. Although Persian literature borrowed from Arabic literary
styles, it also created and enhanced new poetic styles, including
the ruba'i (quatrain), ghazal (erotic lyric), and masnavi
(narrative poem).
5. More widely known than any other work in Arabic, the Thousand
and One Nights is generally excluded from the canon of classical
Arabic literature due to its extravagant and improbable
fabrications in prose, a form that was expected to be more
serious and substantial than verse.
Formation of Western Literature [100 A.D. to 1500]
1. Contrary to popular belief, the medieval period cannot be
characterized as entirely barbaric. During this period, national
literatures in the vernacular appeared.
2. Due to their disparate influences, literature and culture in
medieval Europe were very diverse, drawing from different, often
conflicting sources.
3. Composed around 850, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf speaks about
the warring lifestyle of the Germanic and Scandinavian groups
that conquered the Roman empire.
4. Not only does the Song of Roland set the foundation for the
French literary tradition, but it also establishes the narrative
about the foundation of France itself.
5. Writing in the twelfth century, Marie de France helped
establish the major forms and themes of vernacular literature,
especially for what we now call romances, novelistic narrative's
that deal with adventure and love.
6. The thirteenth-century story Thorstein the Staff-Struck is a
short example of the Icelandic saga tradition that speak's about
the lives of men and women who lived in Iceland and Norway
between the ninth and eleventh centuries.
7. Beginning in Provence around 1100, the love lyric spread to
Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and eventually England.
8. The Divine Comedy offers Dante's controversial political and
religious beliefs within a formal and cosmological framework that
evoke's the three-in-one of the Christian Trinity: God the
Father; God the Son; and God the Holy Spirit.
9. Best known for his Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio was one of
the many medieval writers who contributed to the revival of
classical literary traditions that would come to fruition in the
Italian Renaissance and later spread to other parts of Europe.
10. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight revives the
"native" Anglo-Saxon tradition first seen in Beowulf
that had apparently been submerged between the twelfth and
fourteenth centuries following the Norman Conquest.
11. Although Chaucer's Canterbury Tales does not appear to be
overtly political, it was written during a period of considerable
political and religious turmoil that would eventually give rise
to the Protestant Reformation.
12. Anonymously written plays such as Everyman focused on
morality or were dramatic enactments of homilies and sermons.
Golden Age of Japanese Culture [100 A.D. to 1500]
1. Although Japanese poetry, drama, literature and other writings
of the Golden Age elaborate on a wide range of philosophical,
aesthetic, religious, and political topics, and while literature
and culture have flourished in Japan for over a thousand years,
many misconceptions about Japanese literature persist.
2. One of the earliest monuments of Japanese literature, the
Man'yoshu (The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), appears to
have been intended as an anthology of poetry anthologies.
3. The Kokinshu combines great poems of the past with great poems
of the present; it also integrates short poems into longer
narrative sequences, thereby becoming more than a mere collection
of poems.
4. Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, arguably the first
significant novel in world literature, was written in the early
eleventh century.
5. The Pillow Book is a seemingly unstructured collection of
personal observations, random thoughts, and perceptions that
entered the mind of the author.
6. Not only did the Tale of the Heike help to create the samurai
ideal, it has served as an inspiration for more writers in more
genres than any other single work of Japanese literature.
7. Although Shintoism, the native religion emphasizing the
protective powers of supernaturalism, enjoyed widespread
popularity, Buddhism began to play an increasingly important role
in premodern Japan, most notably in the arenas of literature and
drama.
8. No (translated as "talent" or "skill"),
Japan's classical theater, is a serious and stylized art form
that is produced without most of the artifices of Western theater
such as props and scenery.
Mystical Poetry of India [100 A.D. to 1500]
1. The literary genre of India's medieval era, lyric poetry, was
associated with bhakti, or mystical devotion to God.
2. Bhakti is a populist literary form that is usually composed by
poet-saints of all castes and both genders in their native
tongues.
3. Each poem positions the devotee and God in a particular
relationship, but the most popular relationship is that of erotic
love between a male god and a female devotee.
4. Bhakti poetry is composed in many different regional languages
and elegizes Siva, Krishna, and other important Hindu deities.
5. The emotive quality of the poems, their ability to provide
social critique and the representation of love that crosses
boundaries between the secular and sacred have made Krishna
poetry appealing and accessible to many groups.
Africa [1500-1650]
1. The founding of the Mali empire is attributed to Son-Jara
Keita, whose life and exploits are the subject of the Son-Jara,
the national epic of the Manding people.
2. The rise of ancient Mali in the thirteenth century is closely
associated with the spread of Islam into the region, which had
begun in the seventh century.
3. The principal custodians of the oral tradition are
professional bards, known among the Manding as dyeli or
belein-tigui.
4. The epic of Son-Jara developed by accretion, which together
with its oral transmission may account for its three distinct
generic layers.
5. The ideological function of the epic is the construction of a
Manding common identity under a founding hero.
The Renaissance [1500-1650]
1. During the Renaissance, notions of Europe's and of humankind's
centrality in the world were challenged and partially discredited
by advances in scientific theory, a rediscovery of Greco-Roman
culture, and the so-called discovery of the Americas.
2. The Renaissance reached its peak at different times in
different cultures, beginning in Italy with the visual arts and,
nearly two centuries later, working its way as far as England,
where its achievements are most recognized in drama.
3. An interest in the nature of this life rather than in the life
to come is of central importance in the works of Petrarch and
Erasmus.
4. The Renaissance tendency toward perfection is well illustrated
by Machiavelli's ideal prince and Castiglione's ideal courtier,
but is also illustrated in the reworking of older literary
traditions such as in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.
5. French rulers and aristocrats adopted the artistic, literary,
and social values of the more sophisticated Italian city-states
such as Castiglione's Urbino.
6. Spain's major contributions to Renaissance literature can be
traced to Cervantes and Lope de Vega.
7. Works from the English tradition, including Paradise Lost,
Hamlet, and Othello, question the values of the Renaissance.
Native America and Europe in the New World [1500-1650]
1. On November 8, 1519, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and
a battalion of four hundred soldiers entered and seized
Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital of the emperor Montezuma.
2. Although contact with the Europeans devastated the cultures of
the Native American groups, efforts were also made to preserve
Aztec verbal arts.
3. Though many Aztec and Mayan works were translated into
European languages, they were not made available in native
languages for fear of encouraging native religious practices.
4. Much of the literary work in Native American cultures belongs
to three basic genres of the oral traditionsong, narrative,
and oratory.
5. How is it possible for "outsiders" to appreciate
fully the complexity of literary works that are inextricably
linked to indigenous cultural practices and mores?
Vernacular Literature in China [1650-1800]
1. When the Mongol (Yüan) armies overran northern China and the
southern Sung dynasties, they established themselves as a
dynasty, abolishing governmental principles derived from
Confucian teachings.
2. Often building on works of classical literature, vernacular
literature (dealing with sex, violence, satire, and humor) became
known for its ability to elaborate creatively on plots of earlier
works by filling in details or perhaps even by articulating what
had been omitted.
3. Under the Ch'ing Dynasty, and especially during the period
known as the "literary inquisition," classical Chinese
writing suffered a devastating blow.
4. China's autonomy and cultural self-confidence were decimated
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when European
colonial powers began to exert control over China's economy.
Ottoman Empire [1650-1800]
1. On the tenth night of Muharram in 1040 (August 19, 1630),
Evliya «elebi dreamed that the Prophet Muhammad appeared to him
and encouraged him to pursue his wanderlust.
2. Sometimes traveling in an official capacity and sometimes
traveling as a private individual, Evliya «elebi recorded his
observations in a vivid anecdotal style.
3. After the destruction of the Saljuqid state in the thirteenth
century, the Ottomans established themselves as an independent
dynasty in northwestern Anatolia, from which they expanded into
Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and the Balkans.
4. Under Mehmed II the Conqueror, the Ottomans established an
architectural style that symbolized their imperial ambitions, a
new legal code, and a policy of imperial expansion. They
continued and enriched Arabic and Persian literary traditions.
Enlightenment in Europe [1650-1800]
1. In the midst of the massiveand often
cataclysmicsocial changes that violently reshaped Europe
during the eighteenth century, philosophers and other thinkers
championed reason and the power of the human mind, contributing
to the somewhat misleading appellation of this prerevolutionary
period as an "Age of Enlightenment."
2. Because literature was produced by a small cultural elite, it
tended to address limited audiences of the authors' social peers,
who would not necessarily notice the class- and race-specific
values that served as a basis for proper conduct and actions
outlined in poems, novels, and belles lettres.
3. The notion of a permanent, divinely ordained, natural order
offered comfort to those aware of the flaws in the actual social
order.
4. Reliance on convention as a mode of social and literary
control expresses the constant efforts to achieve an ever-elusive
stability in the eighteenth century.
5. By exercising their right to criticize their fellow men and
women, satirists evoked a rhetorical ascendancy that was obtained
by an implicit alliance with literary and moral tradition.
6. Though she outwardly declared her humility and religious
subordination, Sor (Sister) Juana InČs de la Cruz managed to
advance claims for women's rights in a more profound and
far-reaching way than anyone had achieved in the past.
Popular Arts in Pre-Modern Japan [1650-1800]
1. To sustain peace, the Tokugawa shoguns expelled Portuguese
traders and Christian missionaries, who tended to play one feudal
baron against another in order to subvert local power, and
prohibited any Japanese from traveling abroad.
2. During this period of peace and stability, the role of samurai
retainers in maintaining shogunal authority shifted from warriors
to bureaucrats.
3. Often indifferent to tradition, this new merchant class
developed a culture of its own, reflecting the fast pace of urban
life in woodblock prints, short stories, novels, poetry, and
plays.
4. Ihara Saikaku is known as a founder of new, popular
"realistic" literature, writing about the foibles of
the merchant class in urban Osaka.
5. Cultivating the persona of the lonely wayfarer, Matsuo Basho's
austere existence was the antithesis to Saikaku's prosperity.
6. Ueda Akinari is known for his successful insinuation of the
supernatural into everyday life and his keen understanding of the
irrational implications of erotic attachment.
Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America [1800-1900]
1. Emerging in the late eighteenth century and extending until
the late nineteenth century, Romanticism broke with earlier
models of thinking that were guided by rationalism and
empiricism.
2. After the American and French revolutions, faith in social
institutions declined considerably; no longer were systems that
were organized around hierarchy and the separation of classes
considered superior.
3. As manufacturing and industrialization developed, resulting in
a decline in the agricultural economy, a "middle class"
began to emerge in England and other parts of Europe.
4. Breaking with the Christian belief that the self is
essentially "evil" and fallible, Romantic poets and
authors often explored the "good" inherent in human
beings.
5. As the middle class rose to ascendancy in the nineteenth
century, new approaches to science, biology, class, and race
began to shake middle-class society's values.
6. Imagination was seen as a way for the soul to link with the
eternal.
7. The new thematic emphases of poetrybelief in the virtues
of nature, the "primitive," and the
pastengendered a form of alienation that was described in
the "social protest" poetry of Romantic poets.
Urdu Lyric Poetry in Northern India [1800-1900]
1. The most popular lyric genre of Urdu, a hybrid language
developed from the interaction of Hindi and Persian, is the
ghazal.
2. Derived from the Arabic praise poem (qasidah), ghazal reflects
on lovehuman, divine, and spiritual.
3. Formal and thematic conventions are important to the ghazal
tradition.
4. Mirza Asadullah Khan, or Ghalib (Conqueror) as he is more
commonly known, is considered the most important poet associated
with this tradition.
Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism in Europe [1800-1900]
1. Nourished by the political and social aspirations of the
middle class, nationalism and colonialism came to dominate the
nineteenth century in Europe.
2. Though its first literary use was in Germany at the turn of
the nineteenth century, the term realism did not become a
commonly accepted literary and artistic slogan until French
critics began to use it in the 1850s.
3. Though the realist program made innumerable subjects available
to art, it narrowed the themes and methods of literature.
4. Contrary to what they might think, realist writers did not
make a complete break with past literary conventions, nor did
they follow "to the letter" the theories and slogans
they propounded.
5. As prose looked outward at the world around it, poetry looked
inward at its very construction as language.
6. Inspired by Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Symbolism's
manifesto appeared in 1886, thereby not including the great
midcentury poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and MallarmČ.
The 20th Century: European Modernisms [1900s]
1. In the twentieth century, modernization was used in tandem
with colonization as a means to legitimize the often forced
adoption of Western concepts of "progress" in different
parts of the world. As such, modernization also became a stimulus
for movements that rejected "progress" in favor of
"tradition."
2. European writers and thinkers looked beyond models of
scientific rationalism for means of expressing knowledge of the
world and lived experience that could not be apprehended by
intellect alone.
3. Literary and linguistic systems were seen as games in which
"pieces" (words) and "rules" (grammar,
syntax, and other conventions) were combined with playfulness and
sometimes with pathos to emphasize the instabilities of language.
4. The twentieth century is sometimes called a "century of
isms" as different groups of European artists and
intellectuals attempted to give expression to contemporary
history and subjectivity.
5. Western modernism is too conceptually limited to describe much
of the cultural productions of older nations in North America
such as the Navajo, Zuni, and Inuit.
Decolonization [1900s]
1. With the spread of Western colonialism from Europe and North
America to Asia, Africa, and South America also came the spread
of its by-product; Western modernism.
2. Though early criticisms were leveled at former colonial
subjects who wrote in the colonizer's language since such writing
was considered to reflect "impoverished" experiences,
more recent evaluations point to the ways that the writings of
former colonial subjects have enriched European languages.
3. Though social-realist movements varied considerably within
Chinese, Indian, and Soviet contexts, in general they denounced
the bourgeois and colonialist values expounded in Western art and
literature.
4. Though English-language literatures are well known outside
India, literatures in regional languages such as Kannada, Urdu,
Sindhi, Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil represent other aspects of
Indian life.
5. The literary traditions of the diverse countries that the West
calls "the Middle East" reflect the multiple histories
and cultural traditions of the region.
6. In addition to experiences of Western colonialism in Africa,
African writers also address issues related to the slave trade
and to the African diaspora.
7. The generally political nature of magical realism in South
American writing was often missed by earlier generations of
Western readers, who were too amazed by the imaginative
creativity of magical realism.
{*This timeline was found at: http://www.wwnorton.com/nawol/welcome.htm }