History of Literature, Fhilosophy and Religions


(contents)







PART I

A Brief History of Western Literature
Introduction Western Literature
The Foundations of Western Literature
The Bible
Classical  Literature
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
The 17-18th Century
The 18-19th Century 
Modernism







WESTERN LITERATURE



INTRODUCTION

 

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
 

History of literatures in the languages of the Indo-European family, along with a small number of other languages whose cultures became closely associated with the West, from ancient times to the present.

Diverse as they are, European literatures, like European languages, are parts of a common heritage. Greek, Latin, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, Celtic, and Romance languages are all members of the Indo-European family. (Finnish and Hungarian and Semitic languages of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Hebrew, are not Indo-European. Literatures in these languages are, however, closely associated with major Western literatures and are often included among them.) The common literary heritage is essentially that originating in ancient Greece and Rome. It was preserved, transformed, and spread by Christianity and thus transmitted to the vernacular languages of the European Continent, the Western Hemisphere, and other regions that were settled by Europeans. To the present day, this body of writing displays aunity in its main features that sets it apart from the literatures of the rest of the world. Such common characteristics are considered here.


Ancient literature

The stark fact about ancient Western literature is that the greater part of it has perished. Some of it had been forgotten before it was possible to commit it to writing; fire, war, and the ravages of time have robbed posterity of most of the rest; and the restitutions that archaeologists and paleographers achieve from time to time are small. Yet surviving writings in Greek and far more in Latin have included those that on ancient testimony marked the heightsreached by the creative imagination and intellect of the ancient world.

Five ancient civilizations—Babylon and Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the culture of the Israelites in Palestine—each came into contact with one or more of the others. The two most ancient, Assyro-Babylonia, with its broken clay tablets, and Egypt, with its rotted papyrus rolls, make no direct literary signal to the modern age; yet Babylon produced the first full code of laws and two epics of archetypal myth, which came to be echoed and re-echoed in distant lands, and Egypt's mystical intuition of a supernatural world caught the imagination of the Greeks and Romans. Hebrew culture exerted its greatest literary influence on the West because of the place held by its early writings as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible; and thisliterature profoundly influenced Western consciousness through translation from about the time of St. Augustine onward into every vernacular language as well as into Latin. Until then, Judaism's concentrated spirituality set it apart from the Greek and Roman world.

Though influenced by the religious myths of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Egypt, Greek literature has no direct literary ancestry and appears self-originated. Roman writers looked to Greek precept for themes, treatment, and choice of verse and metre. Rome eventually passed the torch on to the early Middle Ages, by which time Greek had been subsumed under a wholly Latin tradition and was only rediscovered in its own right at the Renaissance—the “classical” tradition afterward becoming a threat to natural literary development,particularly when certain critics of the 17th century began to insist that the subjects and style of contemporary writing should conform with those employed by Greece and Rome.

All of the chief kinds of literature—epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric, satire, history, biography, and prose narrative—were established by the Greeks and Romans, and later developments have for the most part been secondary extensions. The Greek epic of Homer was the model for the Latin of Virgil; the lyric fragments of Alcaeus and Sappho were echoed in the work of Catullus and Ovid; the history of Thucydides was succeeded by that of Livy and Tacitus; but the tragedy of the great Athenians of the 5th century BC had no worthy counterpart in Roman Seneca nor had the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle in those of any ancient Roman, for the practical Romans were not philosophers. Whereas Greek writers excelled in abstraction, the Romans had an unusually concrete vision and, as their art of portraiture shows, were intensely interested in human individuality.

In sum, the work of these writers and others and perhaps especially that of Greek authors expresses the imaginative and moral temper of Western man. It has helped to create his values and to hand on a tradition to distant generations. Homer's epics extend their concern from the right treatment of strangers to behaviour in situations of deep involvement among rival heroes, their foes, and the overseeing gods; the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles are a sublime expression of man's breakthrough into moral awareness of his situation. Among Roman authors an elevated Stoicism stressing the sense of duty is common to many, from Naevius, Ennius, and Cato to Virgil, Horace, and Seneca. A human ideal is to be seen in the savage satire of Juvenal and in Anacreon's songs of love and wine, as it is in the philosophical thought of Plato and Aristotle. It is given voice by a chorus of Sophocles, “Wonders are many, but none is more wonderful than man, the power that crosses the white sea. . . .” The human ideal held up in Greek and Latin literature, formed after civilization had emerged from earlier centuries of barbarism, was to be transformed, beforethe ancient world came to its close, into the spiritual ideal of Judeo-Christianity, whose writers foreshadowed medieval literature.
 

Apuleius "The Golden Asse"
illustration by Jean de Bosschere
 

Medieval literature

Medieval, “belonging to the Middle Ages,” is used here to refer to the literature of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean from as early as the establishment of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire about AD 300 for medieval Greek, from the period following upon the fall of Rome in 476 for medieval Latin, and from about the time of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance he fosteredin France (c. 800) to the end of the 15th century for most written vernacular literatures.
Christianity and the church

The establishment of Christianity throughout the territories that had formed the Roman Empire meant that Europe was exposed to and tutored in the systematic approach to life, literature, and religion developed by the early Church Fathers. In the West, the fusion of Christian and classical philosophy formed the basis of the medieval habit of interpreting life symbolically. Through St. Augustine, Platonic and Christian thought were reconciled: the permanent and uniform order of the Greek universe was given Christian form; nature became sacramental, a symbolic revelation of spiritual truth. Classical literature was invested with this same symbolism; exegetical, or interpretative, methods first applied to the Scriptures were extended as a general principle to classical and secular writings. The allegorical or symbolic approach that found in Virgil a pre-Christian prophet and in the Aeneid a narrative of the soul's journey through life to paradise (Rome) belonged to the same tradition as Dante's allegorical conception of himself and his journey in The Divine Comedy.

The church not only established the purpose of literature but preserved it. St. Benedict's monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy was established in 529, and other monastic centres of scholarship followed, particularly after the 6th- and 7th-century Irish missions to the Rhine and Great Britain and the Gothic missions up the Danube. These monasteries were able to preserve the only classical literature available in the West through times when Europe was being raided by Goths, Vandals, Franks, and, later, Norsemen in succession. The classical Latin authors so preserved and the Latin works that continued to be written predominated over vernacular works throughout most of the period. St. Augustine's City of God, the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the Danishchronicle of Saxo Grammaticus, for example, were all written in Latin, as were most major works in the fields of philosophy, theology, history, and science.


Vernacular works and drama

The main literary values of the period are found in vernacular works. The pre-Christian literature of Europe belonged to an oral tradition that was reflected in the Poetic Edda and the sagas, or heroic epics, of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the German Song of Hildebrand. These belonged to a common Germanic alliterative tradition,but all were first recorded by Christian scribes at dates later than the historical events they relate, and the pagan elements they contain were fused with Christian thought andfeeling. The mythology of Icelandic literature was echoed in every Germanic language and clearly stemmed from a common European source. Only the Scandinavian texts, however, give a coherent account of the stories and personalities involved. Numerous ballads in different countries also reflect an earlier native tradition of oral recitation. Among the best known of the many genres that arose in medieval vernacular literatures were the romance and the courtly love lyric, both of which combined elements from popular oral traditions with those of more scholarly or refined literature and both derived largely from France. The romance used classical or Arthurian sources in a poetic narrative that replaced the heroic epics of feudal society, such as The Song of Roland, with a chivalrous tale of knightly valour. In the romance, complex themes of love, loyalty, and personal integrity were united with a quest for spiritual truth, an amalgam that was represented in every major western European literature of the time. The love lyric has had a similarly heterogeneous background. The precise origins of courtly love are disputed, as is the influence of a popular love poetry tradition; it is clear, however, that the idealized lady and languishing suitorof the poets of southern and northern France were imitated or reinterpreted throughout Europe—in the Sicilian school of Italy, the minnesingers (love poets) of Germany, and in a Latin verse collection, Carmina Burana.

Medieval drama began in the religious ceremonies that took place in church on important dates in the Christian calendar. The dramatic quality of the religious service lent itself to elaboration that perhaps first took the form of gestures and mime and later developed into dramatic interpolations on events or figures in the religious service. This elaboration increased until drama became a secular affair performed on stages or carts in town streets or open spaces. The players were guild craftsmen or professional actors and were hired by towns to perform at local or religious festivals. Three types of play developed: the mystery, the miracle, and the morality. The titles and themes of medieval drama remained religious but their pieces' titles can belie their humorous or farcical and sometimes bawdy nature. One of the best knownmorality plays was translated from Dutch to be known in English as Everyman. A large majority of medieval literature was anonymous and not easily dated. Some of the greatest figures—Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—came late in the period, and their work convincingly demonstrates the transitional nature of the best of medieval literature, for, in being master commentators of the medieval scene, they simultaneously announced the great themes and forms of Renaissance literature.


The Renaissance

The name Renaissance (“Rebirth”) is given to the historical period in Europe that succeeded the Middle Ages. The awakening of a new spirit of intellectual and artistic inquiry, which was the dominant feature of this political, religious, and philosophical phenomenon, was essentially a revival of the spirit of ancient Greece and Rome; in literature this meant a new interest in and analysis of the great classical writers. Scholars searched for and translated “lost” ancient texts, whose dissemination was much helped by developments in printing in Europe from about 1450.

Art and literature in the Renaissance reached a level unattained in any previous period. The age was marked by three principal characteristics: first, the new interest in learning, mirrored by the classical scholars known as humanists and instrumental in providing suitable classical models for the new writers; second, the new form of Christianity, initiated by the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther, which drew men's attention to the individual and his inner experiences and stimulated a response in Catholic countries summarized by the term Counter-Reformation; third, the voyages of the great explorers that culminated in Christopher Columbus' discovery of America in 1492 and that had far-reaching consequences on the countries that developed overseas empires, as well as on the imaginations and consciences of the most gifted writers of the day.

To these may be added many other factors, such as the developments in science and astronomy and the political condition of Italy in the late 15th century. The new freedom and spirit of inquiry in the Italian city-states had been a factor in encouraging the great precursors of the Renaissance in Italy, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The flowering of the Renaissance in France appeared both in the poetry of the poets making up the group known as the Pléiade and in the reflective essays of Michel de Montaigne, while Spain at this time produced its greatest novelist, Miguel de Cervantes. Another figure who stood out above hiscontemporaries was the Portuguese epic poet Luís Camões, while drama flourished in both Spain and Portugal, being represented at its best by Lope de Vega and Gil Vicente. In England, too, drama dominated the age, a blend of Renaissance learning and native tradition lending extraordinary vitality to works of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and others, while Shakespeare, England's greatest dramatic and poetic talent, massively spanned the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the17th.

In the 16th century the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus typified the development of humanism, which embodied the spirit of critical inquiry, regard for classical learning, intolerance of superstition, and high respect for men as God's most intricate creation. An aspect of the influence of the Protestant Reformation on literature was the number of great translations of the Bible, including an early one by Erasmus, into vernacular languages during this period, setting new standards for prose writing. The impetus of the Renaissance carried well into the 17th century, when John Milton reflected the spirit of Christian humanism.
 

Dante "The Divine Comedy" (Illustration by G. Dore)
 

The 17th century

Challenging the accepted

The 17th century was a period of unceasing disturbance and violent storms, no less in literature than in politics and society. The Renaissance had prepared a receptive environment essential to the dissemination of the ideas of the new science and philosophy. The great question of the century, which confronted serious writers from Donne to Dryden, was Michel de Montaigne's “What do I know?” or, in expanded terms, the ascertainment of the grounds and relations of knowledge, faith, reason, and authority in religion, metaphysics, ethics, politics, economics, and natural science.

The questioning attitude that characterized the period is seen in the works of its great scientists and philosophers: Descartes's Discourse on Method (1637) and Pascal's Pensées (written 1657–58) in France; Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605) and Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) in England. The importance of these works has lain in their application of a skeptical, rationalist mode of thought not only to scientific problems but to political and theological controversy and general problems of understanding and perception. This fundamental challenge to both thought and language had profound repercussions in man's picture of himself and was reflected in what T.S. Eliot described as “the dissociation of sensibility,” which Eliot claimed took root in England after the Civil War, whereby, in contrast to the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers who could “devour any kind of experience,” later poets in English could not think and feel in a unified way.


Effects of conflict

A true picture of the period must also take into account the enormous effect of social and political upheavals during the early and middle parts of the century. In England, where the literary history of the period is usually divided into two parts,the break seems to fall naturally with the outbreak of the Civil War (1642–51), marked by a closure of the theatres in 1642, and a new age beginning with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In France the bitter internecine struggle ofthe Fronde (1648–53) similarly divided the century and preceded possibly the greatest period of all French literature—the age of Molière, Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine. In Germany the early part of the century was dominated by the religious and political conflicts of the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) and thereafter by the attempts of German princes to emulate the central power and splendour of Louis XIV's French court at Versailles. The Netherlands was also involved in the first part of the century in a struggle for independence from Spain (the Eighty Years' War, 1568–1648) that resulted not only in the achievement of this but also in the “Golden Age” of Dutch poetry—that of Henric Spieghel, Daniël Heinsius, and Gerbrand Bredero.

The civil, political, and religious conflicts that dominated the first half of the century were in many ways also the characteristic response of the Counter-Reformation. The pattern of religious conflict was reflected in literary forms and preoccupations. One reaction to this—seen particularly in Italy, Germany, and Spain but also in France and England—was the development of a style in art and literature known as Baroque. This development manifested itself most characteristically in the works of Giambattista Marino in Italy, Luis de Góngora in Spain, and Martin Opitz in Germany. Long regarded by many critics as decadent, Baroque literature is now viewed in a more favourable light and is understood to denote a style the chief characteristics of which are elaboration and ornament, the use of allegory, rhetoric, and daring artifice.

If Baroque literature was the characteristic product of Italy and Germany in this period, Metaphysical poetry was the most outstanding feature in English verse of the first half of the century. This term, first applied by Dryden to John Donne and expanded by Dr. Johnson, is now used to denote a range of poets who varied greatly in their individual styles but who possessed certain affinities with Baroque literature, especially in the case of Richard Crashaw.

Perhaps the most characteristic of all the disputes of the 17th century was that in which the tendency to continue to develop the Renaissance imitation of the classics came into conflict with the aspirations and discoveries of new thinkers in science and philosophy and new experimenters with literary forms. In France this appeared in a struggle between the Ancients and Moderns, between those who thought that literary style and subject should be modeled on classical Greek and Latin literature and supporters of native tradition. In Spain a similar conflict was expressed in a tendency toward ornament, Latinization, and the classics (culteranismo) and that toward a more concise, profound, and epigrammatic style (conceptismo ). This conflict heralded through the Moderns in France and the idea of conceptismo in Spain a style of prose writing suitable to the new age of science and exploration. The Moderns in France were largely, therefore, followers of Descartes. In England a similar tendency was to be found in the work of the Royal Society in encouraging a simple language, a closer, naked, natural way of speaking, suitable for rational discourse, paralleled by the great achievements in prose of John Milton and John Dryden.
 

John Milton "Paradise Lost" (Illustration J. Martin)
 

The 18th century

To call the 18th century the Age of Reason is to seize on a useful half-truth but to cause confusion in the general picture, because the primacy of reason had also been a mark of certain periods of the previous age. It is more accurate to say that the 18th century was marked by two main impulses: reason and passion. The respect paid to reason was shown inpursuit of order, symmetry, decorum, and scientific knowledge; the cultivation of the feelings stimulated philanthropy, exaltation of personal relationships, religious fervour, and the cult of sentiment, or sensibility. In literature the rational impulse fostered satire, argument, wit, plain prose; the other inspired the psychological novel and the poetry of the sublime.

The cult of wit, satire, and argument is evident in England in the writings of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson, continuing the tradition of Dryden from the 17th century. The novel was established as a major art form in English literature partly by a rational realism shown in the works of Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, and Tobias Smollett and partly by the psychological probing of the novels of Samuel Richardson and of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. In France the major characteristic of the period lies in the philosophical and political writings of the Enlightenment, which had a profound influence throughout the rest of Europe and foreshadowed the French Revolution. Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles de Montesquieu, and the Encyclopédistes Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert all devoted much of their writing to controversies about social and religious matters, often involving direct conflict with the authorities. In the first part of the century, German literature looked to English and French models, although innovative advances were made by the dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The great epoch of German literature came at the end of the century, when cultivation of the feelings and of emotional grandeur found its most powerful expression in what came to be called the Sturm undDrang (“Storm and Stress”) movement. Associated with this were two of the greatest names of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of whom in drama and poetry advanced far beyond the turbulence of Sturm und Drang.


The 19th century

The 19th century in Western literature—one of the most vital and interesting periods of all—has special interest as the formative era from which many modern literary conditions and tendencies derived. Influences that had their origins or were in development in this period—Romanticism, Symbolism, Realism—are reflected in the current of modern literature, and many social and economic characteristics of the 20th century were determined in the 19th.


Romanticism

The predominant literary movement of the early part of the 19th century was Romanticism, which in literature had its origins in the Sturm und Drang period in Germany. An awareness of this first phase of Romanticism is an important correction to the usual idea of Romantic literature as something that began in English poetry with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Moreover, although it is true that the French Revolution of 1789 and the Industrial Revolution were two main political and social factors affecting the Romantic poets of early 19th-century England, many characteristics of Romanticism in literature sprang from literary or philosophical sources. A philosophical background was provided in the 18th century chiefly by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose emphasis on the individual and the power of inspiration influenced Wordsworth and also such first-phase Romantic writers as Friedrich Hölderlin and Ludwig Tieck in Germany and the French writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, whose Paul et Virginie (1787) anticipated some of the sentimental excesses of 19th-century Romantic literature. Positive as it was, the influence of Rousseau must also be seen as a partly negative reaction against 18th-century rationalism with its emphasis on intellect.

Belief in self-knowledge was, indeed, a principal article of Romantic faith. Late 18th-century French writers such as Fabre d'Olivet sought to explain the physical world by an idea of a “breath of life” similar to the “inspiration” of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Romantics believed that the real truth of things could be explained only through examination of their own emotions in the context of nature and the primitive. Because of this emphasis on inspiration, the poet came to assume a central role—that of seer and visionary. Simultaneously, such formal conventions as imitation of the classics were rejected as binding rules. A new directness of the poet's role emphasized the language of the heart and of ordinary men, and Wordsworth even tried to invent a new simplified diction. Poetry became divorced from its 18th-century social context, and a poet was answerable only to ultimate truth and himself. Two classic poses of the Romantic poet were the mystic visionary of John Keats and the superman of Lord Byron—indeed, satirization of the Byronic hero was to become a theme of later novelists such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, even though he himself had Romantic antecedents.

The fact that Dostoyevsky was a Russian showed how the Romantic stream flowed across Europe. In Spain and Italy, Hungary, Poland, and the Balkans, it took the form of drama, which in England failed to produce great works. The early and middle 19th century was a time of poetry and prose rather than of drama. The Romantic style in poetry was seen everywhere in Europe—in José de Espronceda in Spain; Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy, where it became identified with nationalist sentiments; Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland.In America, a Romantic thread also allied with the emergence of national feeling could be seen in the adventurous stories of James Fenimore Cooper; in the supernatural and mystic element in Edgar Allan Poe; in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and in the Transcendentalist theories of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, which, as Wordsworth's pronouncements had done, affirmed the power of “insight” to transcend ordinary logic and experience.

The impetus of Romantic poetry began to slacken after about 1830 and gave way to more objective styles, although many of its themes and devices, such as the misunderstood artist or the unhappy lover, continued to be employed.

Post-Romanticism

Arguably the first post-Romantic poet was a German, Heinrich Heine, but German poetry in the mid-19th century mostly followed Wordsworth, though new tendencies were to be found in August von Platen Hallermunde and an Austrian, Nikolaus Lenau. The principal development was to be seen in France in the growth of a movement known as Parnassianism. Originating with Théophile Gautier, Parnassianism in some ways was an offshoot of Romanticism rather than a reaction against it. In concentrating on the purely formal elements of poetry, on aesthetics, and on “art for art's sake,” it changed the direction of French poetry and had much influence abroad. Its most illustrious representative was Charles Baudelaire, who believed that “everything that is not art is ugly and useless.” Another branch of new development was the growth of Impressionism and the Symbolist movement, a result of “borrowing” from movements in painting, sculpture, and music. Paul Verlaine, foremost of the Impressionists, used suggestion, atmosphere, and fleeting rhythms to achieve his effects. Symbolism, a selective use of words and images to evoke tenuous moods and meanings, is conveyed in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. The advance of French poetry in the middle and later part of the century was an achievement of individuals, based on invention of a personal idiom.

The spread of education and, in England, of circulating libraries increased a demand for novels. At the beginning of the 19th century Jane Austen had already satirized the excesses of the Gothic novel, a harbinger of medievalizing Romanticism in the latter part of the 18th century, in Northanger Abbey and the conflict of sense and Romantic sensibility in Sense and Sensibility. In France the conflict of intelligence and emotion appeared in the work of Benjamin Constant (Adolphe, 1816) and most notably in Le Rouge et le noir (1830) of Stendhal and later in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857). The detailed verbal scrupulousness and Realism exhibited in the work of Flaubert and of Honoré de Balzac were carried forward by Guy de Maupassant in France and Giovanni Verga in Italy; they culminated in the extreme Naturalism of Émile Zola, who described his prose innovels such as Thérèse Raquin (1867) as “literary surgical autopsy.”

But Realism and nationalism seem irrelevant as descriptions of the great writers of the period—for example, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy in England and Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekhov in Russia. In such writers there was a distinct bias toward literature with a social purpose, stimulated by awakening forces of liberalism, humanism, and socialism in many Western countries.

A decline of the Romantic theatre into melodrama was fairly general in Europe, and it was slower than the novel to take upproblems of contemporary life. When revival came, through the work of a Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, Romantic conflicts of visionary and realist, individual and society were restated, and this was true also of the plays of August Strindberg in Sweden. In Russia a modern theatre became a vital influence that could trace its beginnings back to Gogol's Government Inspector (1836) but was to be felt later in the century in Turgenev's Month in the Country (1850) and, above all, in the work of Anton Chekhov, a great dramatist of the period.
 

Oscar Wilde "Salome" (Illustration by Beardsley)
 

The 20th century

When the 20th century began, social and cultural conditions that prevailed in Europe and America were not too different from those of the middle and late 19th century. Continuity could be seen, for example, in the work of four novelists writing in English at the turn of the century and after. Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence all demonstrated in the progress of their work the transition from a relatively stable world at the end of the 19th century to a new age that began with World War I. The awakening of anew consciousness in literature was also to be traced in such works of fiction as the first volume of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (Swann's Way, 1913), André Gide's Vatican Cellars (1914), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Franz Kafka's Trial (published posthumously in 1925), and Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (1924).

Various influences that characterized much of the writing from the 1920s were at work in these writers. An interest in the unconscious and the irrational was reflected in their workand that of others of about this time. Two important sources of this influence were Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher to whom both Gide and Mann, for example, were much indebted, and Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytical works, by the 1920s, had had a telling influence on Western intellectuals. A shift away from 19th-century assumptions and styles was not limited to writers of fiction. André Breton's first Manifeste du surréalisme (1924; “Manifesto of Surrealism”) was the first formal statement of a movement that called for spontaneity and a complete rupture with tradition. Surrealism showed the influence of Freud in its emphasis on dreams, automatic writing, and other antilogical methods and, although short-lived as a formal movement, had a lasting effect on much 20th-century art and poetry. The uncertainty of the new age and the variety of attempts to deal with it and give it some artistic coherence can be seen also in Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923); in T.S. Eliot's Waste Land (1922); and in Luigi Pirandello's play about the instability of identity, Henry IV (1922).

The international and experimental period of Western literature in the 1910s and 1920s was important not only for the great works it produced but also because it set a pattern for the future. What was clearly revealed in the major works of the period was an increasing sense of crisis and urgency, doubts as to the 19th century's faith in the psychological stability of the individual personality, and a deep questioning of all philosophical or religious solutions tohuman problems. In the 1930s these qualities of 20th-century thought were not abandoned but, rather, were expanded into a political context, as writers divided into those supporting political commitment in their writing and those reacting conservatively against such a domination of art by politics. Nor did World War II resolve the debate concerning political commitment—issues similar to those that exercised major creative imaginations of the 1930s were still very much alive during the last quarter of the century.

It would be tempting to explain what seemed to be a relative scarcity of great writers in the period after World War II as an inevitable result of the cumulative pressure of disturbing social and technological developments accelerated by that war. Under such fluctuating and doubtful circumstances, it would not seem altogether strange if writing and reading, as traditionally understood, should cease. Indeed, in certain technologically highly developed countries, such as the United States, the printed word itself seemed to some critics to have lost its central position, having been displaced in the popular mind by a visual and aural electronic culture that did not need the active intellectual participation of its audience. Thus the communications media that helped to create something resembling an international popular culture in many Western countries did nothing to make the question of literary value easier to answer. Given the extraordinary conditions in which a modern writer works, it was not surprising that reputations were difficult to judge, that radical experimentation characterized many fields of literature, and that traditional forms of writing were losing their definition and were tending to dissolve into one another. Novels might acquire many features of poetry or be transformed into a kind of heightened nonfictional reportage, while experimentation with typography gave poems an appearance of verbal paintings, and dramatic works, shorn of anything resembling a traditional plot, became a series of carefully orchestrated gestures or events. But formal experimentation was only part of the picture, and to say that modern writing since World War II has been primarily experimental would be to ignore other characteristics that writing acquired earlier in the century and that still continued to be issues. Most good critics felt that there was no lack of good literature being written, despite the lack of major reputations and despite the possibly transitional nature of much of the period's work in its variety of styles and subjects.
 

Tapestry by Sir Edward Burne-Jones