W.W. Norton & Company
Skip to content
Colorblind Mode:
On
|
Off
W. W. NORTON HOME
|
HELP
|
CREDITS
The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, 9e
Section
Audio Glossary
Literary Terms
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 1
Volume 2
Period Introduction Overviews
Timelines
Interactive Maps
Quizzes
Quiz Result
Literary Places
Period Introduction Overviews
Timelines
Interactive Maps
Quizzes
Quiz Result
Literary Places
In This Section
Period Introduction Overviews
Timelines
Interactive Maps
Quizzes
Literary Places
Volume 1
Period Introduction Overview
Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Literature
The Invention of Writing and the Earliest Literatures
Despite the fact that our word literature comes from the Latin for “letters,” the earliest literature took the form of oral, not written, stories and songs.
In the oral tradition, elements like repetition and the use of stock phrases and characters were often prized, whereas these methods might be identified as weaknesses in written literature.
The transition from preliterate (or “oral”) culture to literate culture was gradual and did not occur at the same time for all societies.
Even as cultures became increasingly literate, many authors harkened back to an oral heritage, referring to themselves as “bards” who “sang” their poetry.
Writing first developed in Mesopotamia, largely as a means to record political, legal, and administrative information (rather than as a means to record stories or to create new imaginative works).
The earliest written texts date from 3300–2990 B.C.E.
The most basic form of writing—pictographs (in which characters look like the words they represent)—evolved into the earliest known script, called cuneiform (about 2500 B.C.E.).
Egyptian culture developed a system of hieroglyphics: this used pictures (like the earliest pictographic writing) but hieroglyphics were much more elaborate and could communicate more information.
The ancient writing system that would be most familiar to contemporary Western readers is that of the Phoenicians. The Phoenician system used 22 characters, each of which stood for a consonant sound (rather than a single character representing a particular object in the world).
The Greeks, in the eighth or ninth century B.C.E., modified the Phoenician system by adding characters that stood for vowel sounds. The Romans, picking up from the Greeks, developed the alphabet that would be recognizable to us today.
Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Cultures
Ancient cultures in the Mediterranean developed primarily in areas that were close to basic natural resources, particularly those areas that could support farming: the Nile Valley in Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys in the Near East (modern Iraq).
Cities, including Thebes, Memphis, Babylon, and Nineveh, developed in these agricultural areas.
Various cultures developed in the Mediterranean and Near East (like the Greeks, Hebrews, and Romans), and though they were considerably different from one another (and were geographical separate as well), early trade and colonization enabled a great deal of cross-cultural exchange.
Most ancient cultures were polytheistic (i.e., they believed in a pantheon of gods). Religious stories and characters were shared, and reinvented, across cultures. This produced a complicated case of same-but-different, as diverse religions seem to have shared fundamentally similar narratives and characters (though adapted to local contexts).
For early cultures, religion did not necessarily provide a moral code of conduct, nor were divine characters meant to be understood as representative of “correct” moral behavior. An early exception, however, was the Hebrew tradition, which understood religion as outlining a moral code and belief system to which all members of the culture should adhere.
The Greeks
The earliest inhabitants of Greece were a mix of native tribes and Indo-European invaders. The language they spoke shows evidence of this mix in its combination of European influences (Italic and Celtic, for example) but also its Indian influence.
In its earliest period, Greek culture developed on the island of Crete and also on the mainland.
After a devastating fire destroyed mainland palaces, the Greeks entered a “Dark Ages”: they lost their writing system, their arts and crafts enterprises, and most of their wealth.
During this “Dark Ages,” oral literature grew in prominence once again (and from this tradition would come Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey). It was not until the eighth century B.C.E. that the Greeks (re)developed a writing system, this time borrowed from the Phoenicians (the 22-character set representing consonant sounds).
In part due to Greece’s fragmented geography (scattered islands and mountainous terrain), numerous individual city-states developed, rather than a single cultural and economic center.
At the time of Greece’s reemergence from its Dark Ages, the Persian Empire ruled a vast territory stretching from Asia Minor (eastern Greece/western Turkey on a modern map) all the way eastward into India.
Despite its power, however, the Persian Empire was unable to capture areas of mainland Greece, such as Athens or Sparta (which repelled Persian invasions from 490 to 479 B.C.E.). The “underdog” story of the Greeks repelling Persian invaders received modern Hollywood treatment in the 2006 film 300, in which King Leonidas defends Thermopylae with his army of 300 men.
During the fifth century B.C.E., Greek culture produced its most important literary and cultural achievements.
Two primary cities emerged during this time: Sparta and Athens. While Sparta was ruled by a strict, military oligarchy (rule by the few), Athens cultivated an active democracy (rule by the people).
Athenian “democracy,” as relatively progressive as it was, still included only a small percentage of “the people” in governance, and then only male citizens held any rights. Women and slaves—often spoken of as having the same social status—were allowed no voice in politics, had no legal rights, and could not own property.
Sparta and Athens, so different in their social organization, eventually went to war against each other in 431 B.C.E. Athens was defeated in 404 B.C.E.
Prior to this defeat, however, Athenian culture reached new heights. With growing interest in new ideas, a new system of education began to develop and a new role for teachers emerged: that of Sophist, or “wisdom teacher.” These professional tutors taught diverse subjects like rhetoric, history, ethics, literature, and astronomy.
One of the most famous Sophists was Socrates, who would be defended by his equally famous pupil, Plato, as a true teacher of wisdom, especially as the term sophist grew to denote not just “teacher” but one who could use words to twist the truth (and thus corrupt his pupils).
Socrates was eventually executed for his supposed corruption of the young.
With Greek city-states in disarray following the war between Athens and Sparta, Greece fell under Macedonian power. The son of the Macedonian King Philip—who would come to be known as Alexander the Great—eventually took control of the Greek city-states and then led successful campaigns against the Persians. His victories would produce a massive empire.
The Hellenistic Period (323–146 B.C.E.) followed after Alexander’s death and the fragmentation of the empire into independent kingdoms. But into these disparate kingdoms had spread Greek cultural influence, including language, literature, art, and political models.
Rome
Following Alexander’s death in 323 B.C.E. and through most of the following Hellenistic period (323–146 B.C.E.), Rome (which would eventually become an empire of its own) was slowly expanding its territory throughout Italy, Spain, and into Carthage (North Africa).
The Roman political system was modeled as a republic: a system wherein power is distributed among a number of different governing bodies, which included elected officials, upper-class senators, and assemblies of common citizens. Many hundreds of years later, this division of power would provide a fundamental framework for the political structure in the United States.
Romans prided themselves on upholding their cultural traditions of virtue and integrity. It was through unity, the Romans believed, that they derived their power.
Roman governance was also efficient and practical: the Romans built roads, sewers, and bridges, some of which are still standing.
Despite its practical orientation, Roman culture produced an early literature that often challenged ideals of propriety and uniform belief and behavior.
Roman literature developed once the empire had reached its height, and it borrowed quite openly from its Greek models.
The centuries immediately before and after the Common Era saw a long line of Roman Emperors (beginning with Augustus, who defeated Anthony and his ally/lover Cleopatra). The Roman Empire, stretching from modern Britain to North Africa and into the Near East, left an indelible cultural imprint. This sense of a world-state would pave the way for Rome to once again rise as an empire in the tenth century C.E., though it would be an explicitly religious one in its next incarnation: the Holy Roman Empire.
Circling the Mediterranean: Europe and the Islamic World
Circling the Mediterranean
From antiquity to the Middle ages (ending in the fifteenth century or so), the Mediterranean Sea enabled the exchange of goods and ideas from diverse cultures that included Europe, North Africa, and the Near and Middle East.
Despite the fact that early scholars generally understood the “European” and “Islamic” worlds of the Middle Ages to be quite distinct, and often at odds with one another, we now see great variation within each of these worlds along with many intimate links between them.
People of the Middle Ages rarely referred to themselves as “European”; rather they identified themselves with more specific cultural groups, like “Christians” or “Normans” or “English.”
The literary traditions of pre-Renaissance Europe were by no means derived from ancient Greek and Roman traditions alone. Rather, they were influenced by Arabic and Persian traditions as well. The fact of this cultural mixing stands in contrast to common misconceptions of a pure European heritage derived solely from Western literary and philosophical traditions.
Christianity and Platonism
Between the years 100 and 400 C.E. the Roman Empire saw the rise of various brands of Christianity (and Judaism) that organized themselves around different religious principles; these emerging belief systems included elements of the relatively new Christian gospel but also included earlier Greek traditions as well.
In 382 Saint Jerome was commissioned to produce a Bible that was translated into Latin. This became known as the Vulgate (or “commonly used”) version, and it helped to codify the various brands of Christian belief into a more unified, single doctrine.
Emerging Christianity rejected much of the importance that earlier Roman culture had placed on the arts, except where art could be used to glorify God, as in religious painting, hymns, and liturgical music.
Christianity, though it was just one of a number of competing religious sects, ultimately became the state religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine in the fourth century.
The Roman Empire under Constantine stretched so widely that it had two recognized capitals: Rome in the West and Byzantium (renamed Constantinople, after Emperor Constantine) in the East.
The diaspora, or “scattering,” of Jews from Jerusalem in 70 C.E. would provide the basis for an archetypal mythic figure—the wandering Jew—that would inform many later literary traditions.
The Spread of Islam
The dissemination of the Qur’an by Muhammad and his followers in the seventh century had a profound effect on the cultures of the Mediterranean.
Islamic rule grew rapidly and by 750 C.E. reached from areas of Spain in the West to India in the East.
Islam fashioned itself in conformity with dictates in the Qur’an and the exemplary life lived by its prophet, Muhammad. However, Islamic cultures varied widely across the empire.
The most important religious division within the Islamic empire was between the Sunni and Shi’a lineages of authority.
Religious divisions were accompanied by political divisions in medieval Islam; this led to their being a number of political and religious centers such as Damascus (Syria), Baghdad (Iraq), and Cairo (Egypt). Despite variations among Islamic cultures, they all shared Arabic as a common language, which helped to enable to exchange of ideas.
The early Islamic empire fell to Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century. The Mongols, however, converted to Islam. They too would eventually fall when the Ottoman Empire consolidated its power in the eastern Mediterranean in the fifteenth century.
One particularly rich source of literary and mythological influence on early Islam was Persia (modern-day Iran, though the Persian Empire stretched well beyond this). Persian influence continued into the Ottoman Empire (based in modern-day Turkey), which held Persian art and language in high esteem.
Early Islamic literature, especially under Persian influence, provides examples of sophisticated narrative techniques that remain common today, such as the frame narrative (or frame tale) in which a story, or a series of stories, is told within the “frame” of another story. The Thousand and One Nights is an excellent example: a Persian king has bitterly decided that all women are unfaithful and has married, but subsequently executed the next morning, a succession of virgins; his latest wife, Scheherazade, postpones her own death by beginning a new tale each night—the “Thousand and One” tales within the frame; the king wants to hear how each tale turns out so he lets Scheherazade live.
The Invention of the West
Early Islamic writers did not equate “the West” with Christian Europe. This identification, which is common today, did not emerge until the late Middle Ages.
Early Christian Europe relied almost exclusively on Latin as the language of science, the arts, politics, and religion. It was not until the twelfth century that local, or vernacular languages, became more commonly used for anything but daily conversation.
The medieval Christian Crusades, beginning in 1095, solidified the identity of “Christian Europe” in opposition to perceived, non-Christian enemies: Muslims and Jews.
The simplistic opposition of Christian versus non-Christian has had horrible historic consequences, and it permeated the Christian literature of the Middle Ages.
Central to medieval Western literature became the figure of the knight (and, more specifically, the crusading knight). His public deeds were epic and chivalrous, his private deeds romantic and gentlemanly.
Late medieval literature began to be written in vernacular languages (i.e., those other than Latin, such as Italian, English, and French). However, many authors of the medieval period still held the legacy of Roman culture and literature to be deeply important. This foreshadows what would become a defining characteristic of the next literary age—the Renaissance—which was named for the so-called rebirth of Greek and Roman literary and philosophical ideas.
Europe and the New World: Early Modernity
Europe and the New World: Early Modernity
The Renaissance was a time of well-defined, and often restrictive, social roles.
In contrast to the immediate and grand action common in much medieval literature, writing of the Renaissance often features characters engaged in introspective reflection. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a prime example of this: he spends most of his time contemplating, rather than undertaking, action.
The Renaissance was a time of great scientific and geographical discovery, as is reflected in the literature of the period. New theories of the cosmos were being formulated (by the likes of Copernicus and Galileo), and European explorers (like Columbus) were navigating the globe.
The invention of the movable-type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 meant that new ideas about the world could be printed and communicated more widely than ever before.
Charles, the king of Spain, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 as Spain, a devoutly Christian nation, became a dominant power, thanks largely to a modernized army outfitted with guns and cannons.
Encountering the New World
The discovery of a “new” world in the Americas caused some Europeans to think of Europe as the “Old World,” particularly as explorers encountered cultures and traditions that were entirely foreign, but often as fully developed, as their own.
Many Renaissance thinkers began to question the centrality, and the natural rightness, of the “Old World,” given this newfound diversity of cultures and peoples. Could Renaissance Europe and its traditions and social arrangements thus appear “foreign” and “strange,” even backwards, to people of the New World?
The New World was understood by the majority of Europeans, particularly those in power, as there to be used, exploited, and converted to Christianity. Indigenous populations suffered great abuse at the hands of European powers, though some writers (including both indigenous and European voices) argued for more just treatment of New World cultures.
The massive wealth that flowed back to Europe actually had a destabilizing effect on traditional economies and on social stratification.
Conflicts in Europe
While European powers sought to control New World territories from an ocean away, there were also considerable internal conflicts within Europe, not least being those involving Protestant efforts to challenge perceived abuses by the Catholic Church.
Many European monarchs took up the Protestant cause against the Catholic Church, though they often did so as much out of political interest as religious. For example, looking to throw off papal control by the distant Roman Catholic Church, Henry VIII of England declared himself head of the Church of England.
Ironically, the Protestant revolution that attracted European monarchs who were looking to establish complete control over their subjects, like Henry VIII, also led to greater efforts on the part of those subjects to contest absolute monarchic control. England provides a good example again: in the wake of the English Civil War (1642–51), Charles I was beheaded in 1649, the monarchy was not restored until Charles II ascended to the throne in 1660.
Humanism
Humanism was a movement central to the Renaissance. It focused on what could be learned from ancient Greek and Roman texts about subjects as diverse as individual morality and political organization.
The term Renaissance means “rebirth,” which suggests the degree to which thinkers of the time were interested in returning to ancient texts and ideas and applying them to their contemporary context, often bringing those Classical ideas alongside new scientific discoveries.
The Humanist belief in the dawning of a new intellectual age that reflected understanding of Classical tradition and a new age of discovery led many in the Renaissance to see their culture and their historical moment as superior to any other: the epitome of human thought and endeavor. It is this sense of superiority that led to (often unjust) descriptions of the medieval period prior to the Renaissance as the Dark Ages.
The Well-Lived Life
Typically, those in the Renaissance focused on the here-and-now of their existence and on the appropriateness of their actions to a given situation, not on whether those actions could be judged as right or wrong by some abstract moral or religious code.
The arts, from writing to painting to architecture, were generally celebrated for their ability to delight the reader or viewer and as a showcase for the skill of the artist. Art was to make a lasting impression by virtue of its craft and not necessarily because it evoked or expressed raw emotion.
A focus on earthly activity and pleasure did not preclude those in the Renaissance from expressing deep religious faith in their art, though even in religious painting we often find artists celebrating physical beauty or earthly accomplishment alongside religious doctrine.
Skepticism and Melancholy
Often, the Renaissance appreciation for human endeavor, be it artistic, political, or otherwise, was accompanied by doubt about the grander meaning of that very endeavor.
Melancholy describes not just the feeling of sadness that some Renaissance artists expressed, but it points more specifically to the sense of futility that derives from skepticism about the meaning of earthly effort and endeavor.
The Renaissance can be understood as a time of great intellectual arrogance but also a time of great intellectual doubt. Renaissance writers used metaphors to explore these apparent opposites, and the sheer effort of the metaphoric exploration itself often mattered more than the writer’s ability to reconcile doubt once and for all. Note that such artistic exploration shares an interesting parallel with the literal exploration that marked the Renaissance as an age of discovery.