A Tale of gods and men

A tale of gods and men

The Iliad is a sophisticated piece of storytelling. It relates the tale of the war in Ilium (Troy) from the perspective of one character in particular—Achilles. Parts of the story of the war are told in flashback, or in prophecies of the future. Woven into this plot
are subplots and insights into the lives of the protagonists.
How much of this complexity can be credited to Homer, and how much is a result of refinement
and embroidering over previous generations, is impossible to tell. The result is a work that combines history, legend, and mythology, while offering the essential ingredients of good storytelling— adventure and human drama— that make it a compelling read.
The Iliad is massive, both in
its length and its narrative scope (it is, after all, where we get the idea of things being on an “epic” scale), consisting of over 15,000 lines of verse, divided into 24 books. Rather than simply telling the tale chronologically, Homer grabs the reader’s attention by using a device common to many epics. This is to drop the reader straight into the thick of the action,
or in media res (“the middle of the thing”) as described by the Roman poet, Horace. Homer’s account starts in the final year of the conflict, which has already been ❯❯raging for nine years. Homer digresses to explain some of the background to the events he is describing, but he assumes much prior knowledge about the causes of the conflict, which contemporary readers would have known well.

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The Trojan War

The Trojan War

In ancient Greece many epic tales were told about the Trojan War— a conflict between the Achaeans
an alliance of the Greek states) and the city of Troy. The first and most famous of these accounts were the Iliad and Odyssey, both attributed to a single author, known as Homer. Historians concede that these epics were inspired by actual events— sporadic wars between Greece and Troy did occur some five centuries before the works were written— but their characters and plots are works of the imagination. However, the Greeks of Homer’s era would have believed these stories to be true accounts of the heroism of their ancestors.
The Greeks began to write down their epics around the 8th century bce. Like the spoken tales on which they were based, they took the form of narrative poems. These Greek epics have a regular meter—each line is comprised of six basic rhythmic units, and each of these units contains one long and two short syllables. This meter is known as dactylic hexameter,
or more commonly, “epic meter.” Variations on this basic rhythmic pattern give the flexibility needed for poetic composition.

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Epic Poem

Epic Poem

Epics are narrative poems that recount the story of
a hero who represents a particular culture. They chronicle his quests and ordeals, and account for the hero’s choices and motives, so helping to establish and codify the moral principles of a society.
Epics were among the earliest forms of literature in many cultures around the world. These popular stories were initially told orally, and over time were embellished, reinterpreted, formalized, and finally written down, often laying the foundation’s of a culture’s literary history. Epics usually contained many characters and genealogies, and were long and complex in structure. They were probably learned by rote in a repetitive poetic meter, or recited to a musical accompaniment, since it is far easier to memorize verse than prose. Indeed, the word “epic” itself is derived from the ancient Greek word epos, meaning both “story” and “poem.”
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From Europe to Asia

From Europe to Asia

In northern Europe oral storytelling prevailed, and the tales of these cultures were not written down until around the 8th century. The earliest known complete Anglo- Saxon epic, Beowulf, relates history and mythology preserved by the Scandinavian ancestors of the English. The later Icelandic sagas also drew from the Norse legends. Meanwhile, in mainland Europe the nobility were entertained by
professional poets. Some poets took their subject matter from the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, while the troubadours of southern France chose stirring stories of Charlemagne and his men in battle with the Islamic Moors and Saracens. The trouvères of northern France, in contrast, recited lyrical and passionate tales of chivalry and courtly love about the reign of the legendary King Arthur of Britain.
Farther east, during the “Golden Age” of Islamic culture in the late medieval period when scholarship was held in high esteem, epic narrative tales such as those in
the One Thousand and One Nights were valued for their capacity to entertain, although poetry was considered to be the highest form of literature. In ancient China, too,
heroic legends were considered more a form of folklore than literature, and the first written texts to be accorded the status of classics were those that preserved the history, customs, and philosophy of the culture. Along with these factual texts, however, was a collection of odes that provided a model for Chinese poetry for centuries, reaching its high point under the emperors of the Tang dynasty.
In the 11th century, Japan, which had been dominated by Chinese culture, produced its own distinctive literature in the Japanese language. Fictional prose accounts of life in the Heian court developed from the ancient chronicles of the ruling dynasties, anticipating the emergence of the novel in Europe.

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Greek Drama

Greek drama

Another product of the tradition
of storytelling in ancient Greece was drama, which developed from recounting a narrative to acting out the part of a character and thereby bringing the tale to life. Gradually,this dramatic storytelling became more sophisticated, and by the time Athens was established as a democratic nation-state, the theater was an integral part of its culture, with dramatists such as Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles producing tragedies and comedies which attracted audiences of thousands.

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Tales of gods and men

Tales of gods and men

The first known epics, which include the various versions of The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the great Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, often tell of the origin of a civilization, or a defining moment in its early history. Seen through the exploits of a heroic individual
or a ruling family, these epics also explained the involvement of the gods, often contrasting their powers with the frailties of human heroes. This was a theme that also appeared in the later epics ascribed to Homer. His heroes Achilles and Odysseus are depicted not only
as noble warriors in the Trojan War that established ancient Greece
as a great power, but also as very human characters confronting both fate and their own weaknesses. Later, as Greek influence declined, Roman poets developed their own Latin version of the form, even borrowing the story of the Trojan War, as Virgil did in the Aeneid,
to produce an epic of the beginning of Rome. The scale and depth of Homer’s epics, and their poetic structure, provided the foundation on which Western literature is built.

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The Global Explosion

The global explosion

After two brutal global wars,
the world was ready for change, and literature was central to the counterculture in the West of the 1950s and ’60s. Postmodernist writers and theorists focused on the artifice of writing, demanding more of the reader than simply engaging with a realist narrative. Novels now had fractured or nonlinear time spans, unreliable narrators, episodes of magical realism, and multiple-choice endings. During this period, the West, and in particular writing
in English, also loosened its grip on world culture. Postcolonial writing emerged in countries such as Nigeria, South Africa, and India, and authors such as Gabriel García Márquez helped raise the status of a group of South American writers of extraordinary creativity.
Modern literature now sings with the previously unheard voices of feminists, civil rights campaigners,
gay people, black and Native Americans, and immigrants.
There is a healthy meritocratic blurring of distinction between classic and popular fiction.
Global publishing, independent and internet publishing, global literature courses, national and international book prizes, and
the growing number of works published in translation are bringing Australian, Canadian, South African, Indian, Caribbean, and modern Chinese novels, among others, to a world audience. This vast library of global literature has become both a reminder of shared connections worldwide and a celebration of difference. ■
"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul" (Joyce Carol Oates)

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The rise of the novel

The rise of the novel

Drama and poetry continued to evolve as the novel rose inexorably in importance, and by the end
A word after a word after a word is power. Margaret Atwood of the 18th century the novel had become a major form of literary expression.
Just as artists are described
in terms of movements such as Baroque and Rococo, so literary history is defined by authors united by a particular style, technique, or location. The Romantic movement, characterized by stories driven by the emotions of idiosyncratic heroes, rather than plot and action, had its roots in the German Sturm und Drang movement. Meanwhile,
in England, the Romantic poets testified to the power of nature to heal the human soul, and similar themes were taken up by the
New England Transcendentalists. The word “genre” was increasingly applied to fiction’s subsets—for example, novels in the gothic genre. In the 19th century, Romanticism was superseded by a new form of social realism, played out in the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s English middle and upper classes, and Gustave Flaubert’s provincial French towns, but used increasingly to depict the harsh lives of the poor. Fyodor Dostoyevsky described his novel Crime and Punishment as “fantasy realism,” and the dark interior monologues of the murderer Raskolnikov have the elements of a psychological thriller. Over the years fiction has  diversified into multiple genres and subgenres, which today include everything from dystopian novels to fictional autobiography and Holocaust writing.
Alongside the growth of the novel, the vocabulary of literature expanded to describe styles of writing: for example, “epistolary” novels were written in the form of letters; and “Bildungsroman” and “picaresque” denoted coming-of-age tales. The language used within literature was developing too, and novels in the vernacular voice broadened the scope of national literature with writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain capturing the diversity of
the people of the US.
In the early 20th century, Western society was revolutionized by industrial and technological advances, new artistic movements, and scientific developments. Within two decades, a generation of young men had been wasted in World
War I. A perfect storm of literary experimentation followed, as Modernist writers searched for inventive stylistic features such
as stream-of-consciousness writing, and wrote fragmented narratives representing the anguish and alienation of their changing world. After a brief period of literary
optimism and experimentation, the world was again thrown into turmoil as World War II began, and the production of literature slowed as many writers became involved in the war effort, and produced propaganda or reported from the front rather than writing literature.

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Story telling

Story Telling 

Storytelling is as old as humanity itself. The tradition of capturing the events and beliefs of communities reaches back to a time when humans first sat by
a fire and told tales. History was preserved in the form of legends and mythologies that were passed down from one generation to the next, and offered answers to the mysteries of the universe and its creation.
Written accounts emerged at the same time as ancient civilizations, but at first the invention of writing met simple, prosaic functions—
for example to record transactions between traders or tally quantities of goods. The thousands of cuneiform clay tablets discovered at Ugarit in Syria reveal the already complex
I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second. Laurence Sterne
nature of the written form by
1500 BCE. Writing soon evolved
from a means of providing trading information, to preserving the oral histories that were integral to every culture and their customs, ideas, morals, and social structures. This led to the first examples of written literature, in the epic stories of Mesopotamia, India, and ancient Greece, and the more philosophical and historical texts of ancient China. As John Steinbeck so succinctly put it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1962: “Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.”
Miss Bingley of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice may have been talking fatuously when she declared: “How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!” but
this sentiment rings true for many of us. Despite the almost limitless diversions that face readers today, literature continues to satisfy a spiritual or psychological need,
and open readers’ minds to the world and its extraordinary variety. There are works penned hundreds of years ago that continue to enchant and amuse to this day; complex postmodern texts that
can be challenging in the extreme, yet still hold us in their grip; and new novels that feel so fresh that they read as if words have only just been invented.

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History of Literature

History of Literature

Around 4,000 years ago, the first stories to be written down came
in the form of poems such as Mesopotamia’s The Epic of Gilgamesh and India’s Mahabharata, which were based on oral traditions. Rhyme, rhythm, and meter
were essential aids to memory in songs and oral accounts, so it is unsurprising that the first texts made use of familiar poetic devices. Many early written texts were religious, and sacred texts such
as the Bible and the Koran tell the stories of early histories, and have influenced writing for centuries. The form of literature that became Greek drama used a narrative balladlike form and introduced characters with individual voices, choruses of commentary, and the distinct categories of comedy and tragedy that continue to be used today. The collections of stories that make up the Arabic One Thousand and One Nights have multiple origins, but this prose fiction, written in plain speech, makes use of techniques that eventually became a mainstay in modern novels, such as framing (which introduces stories within the framework of another story), foreshadowing, and the inclusion of repetitive themes.
Although the vast medieval era was studded with secular highlights such as the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and tales of chivalric romance, it was dominated in the West by religious texts in Latin and Greek. During the Renaissance, the joint energies of new philosophical investigation and sheer invention opened the door to literary innovation. The driving force behind the Renaissance was the production of new translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts which freed scholars from the dogma of the church. A humanist program of education which incorporated philosophy, grammar, history, and languages was built
on the wisdom of the ancients. The Bible was translated into vernacular speech, enabling Christians to commune directly with their God. Gutenberg’s printing press brought books into the lives of ordinary people, and authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio made everyday life the subject of literature. By the early 17th century, Miguel de Cervantes and Daniel Defoe had given the world what many scholars consider to be the first novels, and the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was published.

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Definition of Literature

Defining literature

Although the simple definition
of “literature” is “anything that is written down,” the word has become primarily associated with works of fiction, drama, and poetry, and weighted with the impossible- to-quantify distinction of merit
and superiority. These values are intrinsic to the canon of literature drawn upon for academic study and appreciation that has been evolving since the middle of the 19th century. The term “canon” was borrowed from the ecclesiastical canons
of authorized religious texts.
The literary canon—a collection
of works commonly agreed to be of exceptional quality—was formed almost entirely from familiar works of Western European literature.
Since the mid-20th century, cultural and literary theorists have done much to destabilize the canon by disputing the authority of these lists of the works of “dead, white Europeans.” The idea of a perceived canon of “great works” still stands as a useful framework, but rather than the term being used to define the same set of titles, it evolves with each new generation, which
reexamines the ideology and power structures that underpin the selections of previous generations, and questions why certain other works were excluded. Arguably, studying how literature is created and testing its place in the canon may help to make us better readers. In the same spirit, this book features many titles that are traditionally regarded as “great works,” but explores their place in the wider story of literature, and within a richer mix of writing drawn from around the globe. They sit alongside newer texts that empower some of the voices that were silenced over the centuries by social constructs such as colonialism and patriarchy, and Europe’s dominance over literature.

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