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• 2 Significant Literary Works Developed

  • The Old Testaments of the Bible
  • The Iliad and the Odyssey
• Old Testaments of the Bible

  Composed of 39 books in Hebrew language, made of various genres including lyric poem, tales, and histories
• The Iliad and the Odyssey

  Associated with Homer, timeless epics
• Greece endured its reputation to be a cultural overpowering force during the Classical Period (Beginning of the Current Era (CE))
• Greek Drama Flourished During 5th and 4th Centuries BCE


  • Playwrights of comedy (like Aristophanes)
  • Playwrights of tragedy (namely: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes)
• Notable Lyrical Poets


  • Pindar
  • Sappho
• Great Philosophers


  • Plato
  • Aristotle
• The Greek tradition was later endured by the Romans, who resembled their civilization after Greeks
• When Romans gained their imperial authority in 27 BC, the emperor Augustus Caesar urged to have a literary identity that would reflect Rome's potency
• Approximately a decade after, the poet Virgil became renowned because of his Aeneid, an epic modeled on Iliad and Odyssey
• Literary Giants in Rome

  • Dramatists: Seneca, Terence, and Plaurus
  • Poet: Horace
  • Prose writers: Cicero and Apuleius
• Literature of both Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean from the founding of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine, Empire about 300 AD for medieval Greek, to the period following the fall of Rome in 476 for medieval Latin, and from about the time of Charlemagne and the "Carolingian Renaissance" he fostered in France (c. 800) to the end of the 15th century for most written vernacular literatures
• Pre-Christian Literature of Europe

  • Poetic Edda
  • Sagas (heroic epics of Iceland)
  • Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon)
  • Song of Hildebrand (German)
• Well-known Literary Writers from the Religious Aspect

  • Dante Alighieri (Divine Comedy)
  • St. Augustine (The Confessions and City of God)
• Heroic Epics


  • Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon)
  • The Song of Roland (French)
  • The Song of Nibelungs (German)
  • El Cid (Spanish)
• The culture of chivalric adventure was evident in the works associated to King Arthur, including Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur
• Geoffrey Chaucer gained his title as The Father of English Literature with his paramount literary work, The Canterbury Tales
• 3 Major Characteristics of the Renaissance Period

  • The new interest in education, emulated by the classical scholars known as humanists and instrumental in providing appropriate classical models for the new writers
  • The new form of Christianity, introduced by the Protestant Reformation headed by Martin Luther, which drew men's interest to the individual and his inner experiences and encouraged a response in Catholic countries summarized by the term "Counter-Reformation"
  • The journeys of the great explorers that culminated in Christopher Columbus's discovery of America in 1492 and that had extensive consequences on the countries that developed overseas empires, as well as on the minds and consciences of the most exceptional writers of the era
• Characteristics of the Age of Reason (Age of Enlightenment)


  • The cult of wit, satire, and argument manifested in England in the writings of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson
  • The novel was recognized as a major art form in English literature relatively by a rational realism shown in the works of Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, and Tobias Smollett and partly by the psychological exploratory of the novels of Samuel Richardson and of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
• The 18th century was marked by two key impulses: reason and passion
• Characteristics of the Romantic Period

  • "Sturm und Drang" period in Germany
  • English poetry with William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge and the publication of "Lyrical Ballads" in 1798
  • Two major political and social influences affecting the Romantic poets of early 19th-century England- French Revolution of 1789 and Industrial Revolution
• Modernism provided critique of morality of the people belonging to the middle-class society
• A technique called "stream of consciousness" developed by Marcel Proust
• The style of writing in the Postmodernism Period evokes the absence of tradition in a modern consumer-driven, technologically based society
• Authors in the Postmodernism Period began to use a jumble of various ingredients, known as pastiche
• Iliad


  An epic poem written by ancient Greek poet Homer, written in the mid-8th Century BC, considered to be the earliest work in the whole Western literary heritage, one of the best known and loved stories of all time
• Odyssey


  One of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer, divided into 24 books, about the Greek hero Odysseus, King of Ithaca, Trojan War, his wife Penelope, and son Telemachus
• 5 Periods of American Literature

  • The Colonial and Early National Period (17th Century- 1830)
  • The Romantic Period (1830-1870)
  • Realism and Naturalism (1870-1910)
  • The Modernist Period (1910-1945)
  • Postmodernism/Contemporary Period (1945-present)
• Notable Works and Authors in the Colonial and Early National Period

  • Histories of Virginia (1608 and 1624) by John Smith
  • Books on religion by Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop
  • The tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) by Anne Bradstreet
  • The Federalist Papers (between 1787 and 1788) by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
  • Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
  • Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) by Philis Wheatley
  • The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown, the first American novel
  • The Interesting Narrative (1789), an autobiography by Olaudah Equiano, one of the earliest slave narratives and a forceful argument for abolition
  • The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20) by Washington Irving, including The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle
  • Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41) by James Fenimore Cooper
• Key Characteristics of Romanticism


  • Emphasis on individualism and a person's emotional experience over reason
  • Appreciation of the wildness of nature over human-made order
• Notable Transcendentalist Concepts


  • Nature is the Truth
  • Nature is God and God is Nature
  • Be self-reliant and stand up for what you believe
• Notable Romantic Period Authors

  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • James Rusell Lowell
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Margaret Fuller
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Herman Melville
  • Walt Whitman
  • William Wells Brown
  • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Emily Dickinson
• Notable Realism and Naturalism Period Authors

  • Samuel Clemens (pseudonym: "Mark Twain")
  • Theodore Dreiser
  • Paul Laurence Dunbar
  • Henry James
• Notable Modernist Period Authors

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Richard Wright
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Willa Cather
  • William Faulkner
  • John Steinbeck
  • T.S Eliot
  • Robert Frost
  • Carl Sanburg
  • Countee Cullen
  • Langston Hughes
  • Claude Mckay
  • Alice Dunbar Nelson
  • Harriet Manroe
  • Edna St. Vincent Millay
  • Marianne Moore
  • E.E Cummings
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Eugene O'Neill
  • Lillian Hellman
  • Clifford Odets
  • Langston Hughes
  • Thornton Wilder
• Notable Postmodernism/Contemporary Period Authors

  • Richard Wright
  • Ralph Ellison
  • James Baldwin
  • Lorraine Hansberry
  • Gwendolyn Brooks
  • Malcom X
  • Toni Morrison
  • Alice Walker
  • Allen Ginsberg
  • Arthur Miller
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Edward Albee