Talk:History of literature

History Top‑importance

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Literature Top‑importance

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Rewrite

This is a page in need of a comprehensive rewrite. If nobody tackles it soon, I will turn my attention from the Norse & Celtic mythologies to this. user:sjc

we can certainly work on it together ;) --dgd

it needs help. I'm 'roughing it' from my own studies and dim memories, plus a bit of Boorstin to provide guides

OK, it has surfaced again. I will have a good think about it and see what can be done. user:sjc ---

This really is a lot worse than I first thought: eg:

For nearly 1400 years very little new was generated in the written arts.

er. This was when Rabelais was busily knocking out Gargantua and Pantagruel, Beowulf was written, Le Morte d'Arthur, the Mabinogion, the Heimskringla, etc, etc. I fear this is going to need some serious pruning and attention to the ethnocentric biases of the original. user:sjc

New Wikiproject!

Hello all, I have just created a brand new Wikiproject for Literature (there's not even any text in the entry :) ) and I would like to incorporate this article, and all related articles, into that Project - please see Wikipedia:WikiProject and the Talk page for more info. I would much appreciate ongoing contributions and thoughts! Thanks. Simonides 11:31, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Restructure

I have restructured this because over half the sections were concerned with western literature. Hope to add some content over the next few weeks. Filiocht 10:18, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

Writing content of sections

At the moment I'm writing within the sections which already exist but later, when I've got the details in there, I think it will make more sense to merge the "New World" bits into the European ones under the collective name of "literature in the European languages". The language the work is written in has more bearing upon it than the geographical location or the nationality of the writer. For the moment I'll carry on separating European writers from American, Canadian, Latin American and Australasian etc ones.

--wayland 13:45, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

First of all, great work you're doing. I had hoped to do more on this article myself, but have been busy with other things. I agree that a language focus may be good for western and Arabic lit, but wonder if you'd want to go that route for, say, India or Chinese-language writing in Japan? And how reflect the fact that Romanticism or Modernism transcend both national and linguistic boundaries? Probably a flexible mix of language, nationality, period and cultural grouping is best? Filiocht 15:36, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)

I'd just like to note that there's a big difference between a narrative history and a timeline of dates, texts, and authors. Right now the article is a weird mix of the two, which is fine because any of these is much better than the endless "to be added" tags that this article used to be. But at some point it might be better to move the timeline content to its own article and replace it with brief paragraphs that pick out truly significant stuff. -- Rbellin 19:37, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Aeschylus

The formulation of the sentence

'A playwright named Aeschylus changed Western literature forever when he introduced the ideas of dialogue and interacting characters to playwriting. In doing so, he essentially invented "drama": '

is a bit unlucky; Aeschylus is the earliest great playwright to have survived from literature, which in the case of early literature does not necessarily mean he was the one who invented dialogue or "drama".

Orphaned references in History of literature

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of History of literature's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Toomer-222":

From Early Islamic philosophy: G. J. Toomer (1996), Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 222, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198202911.
From Hayy ibn Yaqdhan: G. J. Toomer (1996), Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 222, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198202911.
From Ibn Tufail: G. J. Toomer (1996), Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 222, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198202911.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 07:52, 4 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Too much on the Arabian Nights given exceptional scope of the article.

Given the great scope of this article, meaning words allocated to any individual work must necessarily be few, there's far too much detail on The Arabian Nights. In the section Islamic World I propose...:

Keep paras beginning...
- The most well known fiction from the Islamic world...
- This epic has been influential in the West since...

Remove (and maybe place in the Arabian Nights own article) the para beginning...
- A number of stories within the...

--bodnotbod (talk) 03:22, 11 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The section "Early modern period" is greatly over-balanced by coverage of England.

...it is in desperate need of a broader outlook. --bodnotbod (talk) 04:11, 11 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Christians destroying literature

Can I add this to the end of the 2.3.2 Latin Literature subsection?

However, much of Roman literature has been lost. Classicist Catherine Nixey estimates that 98% of Ancient Roman literature was destroyed by Christians.^[1]

References

^ "How Christianity Screwed Antiquity". GreenLeft. 16 November 2018.

That is just one opinion, & that is a rather superficial review of her book. There were numerous reasons why much of Classical literature was lost, most importantly there were few organized or formal efforts to preserve written literature: beyond the few titles of the literary canon used by grammatici & rhetores in teaching, the survival of written works were at the mercy of what contemporaries thought was worth the labor of copying. Or to put it another way, if you had to write out or pay someone to manufacture & write out every new book you wanted to own, you wouldn't help preserve many works. Modern research has indicated the reason the works of Sappho were lost is not due to Christian prejudice, but because her poems were in a dialect of ancient Greek that was hard for medieval Greek speakers to understand, & combined with changing tastes, there was insufficient interest in replacing worn-out copies of her works. (The sack of Constantinople by Western Crusaders in 1204 also did not help: who knows how many rare manuscripts were lost in that action?) -- llywrch (talk) 16:04, 20 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Criticism

Several omissions here:

There is no discussion of oral literature, which obviously predates writing, & was a major medium of literature -- perhaps more important than written literature -- into modern times.
In parallel with this is the rise of the Internet as a medium of literature, not only websites with collections of writings, but as creating new genres (e.g. Internet memes).
There is still not enough attention to diversity: nothing about the literature of Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, or of native Americans. (Which is why oral literature needs to be covered.)

I suspect these omissions -- & others I have not noticed -- are due to this article's origins. If one looks at the earliest drafts, it's apparent that they were not written with any careful preparation but cover what first came to mind. Subsequent revisions failed to step back & consider a wider context -- which is good in a way, because otherwise we'd be fighting the infection of Poststructural navel-gazing & the jargon of intellectual masturbation. -- llywrch (talk) 16:17, 20 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Now I know there is no discussion on oral literature 105.112.233.55 (talk) 11:33, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

History of literature

How 105.112 105.112.233.55 (talk) 11:32, 2 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

LILTERATURE

List and discuss ten advantage and a disadvantage of literature 41.191.104.74 (talk) 15:52, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

[1] "How Christianity Screwed Antiquity". GreenLeft. 16 November 2018.

[1]