21st Cent Lit

• Latin American literature


  • American, Indian Civilization
  • Conquered by the Spaniards
  • Spanish-speaking countries
  • Magical realism
• Gabriela Garcia Marquez


  Latin American author
• North American literature


  • Rise of science and industry
  • Shaped by history
  • Group of colonies
  • Changes in ways of thinking and feeling
  • Power
  • United States of America
• European literature


  • Indo-European Languages
  • Western Literature
  • Western Civilization
  • Shakespeare
  • British Literature
  • More than just Great Britain
• Australian and Pacific literature


  • I am Moana
  • Aborigines
  • European Settlers
  • Traditions & Ethnic Cultures
  • Issues of the Country
  • The legends of Maui
  • Pacific Islands
  • Myths and Legends
• African literature


  • History and hardships
  • Slavery
  • Colonization
  • Missionaries
  • Diaspora
  • Ancient Egypt & Hieroglyphs
  • Blends with European Culture
• Chinua Achebe


  African author
• Asian literature


  • Haruki Murakami
  • War
  • Religion & spirituality
  • Values
  • Songs, poems, written artifacts
  • Middle East
• World literature


  • Sum total of the world's national literatures
  • Circulation of work into the wider world beyond their country of origin
• Connection of Literature, History, and Culture

  • Reciprocal relationship
  • Culture affects what we write
  • What we write is used to interpret history
  • History influences culture
  • Creates a beautiful loop in which these 3 things work together to define a group of people or nation
• The Tale of Genji is the oldest novel
• Mahabharata is the longest epic poem known
• The Renaissance was a period of European cultural, artistic, political, and economic rebirth following the Middle Ages
• Romanticism was a literary movement that emphasized emotions over reason, and senses over intellect
• The Vedas are a large body of religious texts originated from ancient India
• A Thousand and One Nights is a collection of largely Middle Eastern and Indian stories of uncertain date and authorship
• Dante Alighieri was the author of the Divine Comedy
• William Shakespeare is widely considered the greatest dramatist of all time as well as the most influential writer in the history of the English language
• The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest piece of epic literature
• King Arthur was a legendary king of Britain, and a central figure in the medieval literary tradition
• Homer was the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey
• The Analects is an ancient Chinese philosophical text composed of sayings and ideas attributed to Confucius
• Realism is a genre of literature that presents day-to-day experiences as they occur in reality
• Buddhism is a religion of Eastern and Central Asia growing out of the teaching of Siddhartha Gautama
• Beowulf is a heroic poem, considered the highest achievement of Old English literature and the earliest European vernacular epic
• The Roman Empire was the most extensive political and social structure in western civilization
• Modernism was a movement that emphasizes a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression
• Postmodernism is a literary movement characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality
• Timeline of World Literature


  • Beginnings to 100 AD
  • 100 AD to 1500
  • 1500 to 1650
  • 1650 to 1800
  • 1800 to 1900
  • 1900s
• The Polar Express is a classic 1985 children's book by Chris Van Allsburg about a young boy who takes a train to the North Pole on Christmas Eve
• Eclipse is the name of the third book in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer
• Narnia is a magical country that the White Witch puts a spell on so that it is always winter but never Christmas
• Hogwarts' official motto is Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus (Never Tickle a Sleeping Dragon)
• Life of Pi is a 2001 novel by Yann Martel that features a character stranded on a lifeboat after a shipwreck with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker
• Pennywise is the dancing clown in Stephen King's famed horror novel "It"
• The sperm whale is the species of white whale in Herman Melville's famous Moby-Dick
• Mark Darcy is a character from the classic Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice
• A Series of Unfortunate Events is a set of 13 books by Daniel Handler detailing the story of Sunny, Klaus, and Violet Baudelaire and their struggles to escape their unpleasant circumstances
• Iago is the name of the pet parrot in the film Aladdin who acts as a sidekick to Jafar and a secondary antagonist
• Hans Christian-Andersen was a Danish author who wrote The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, and The Ugly Duckling