Questions tagged [history-of-literature]
Questions about historical development within literature: for example, the history of a particular literary theme or idea, or of literature in a particular country or context. For questions about real-world history as it relates to literature, use [historical-context] instead. For questions about publication dates of specific works or editions, use [textual-history].
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What's the earliest fictional work of literature that contains an allusion to an earlier fictional work of literature?
I need to define my terms quite carefully for this question. So the Mirriam-Webster definition of allusion is:
an implied or indirect reference especially in literature
i.e. a poem that makes ...
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What was the first play that appeared in print in Europe?
Books printed in Europe before 1501 are known as incunables. Many of the works that appeared in print before 1501 were religious (e.g. missals) or academic. The majority of texts were in Latin. ...
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Which literary movement do Pushkin's Little Tragedies belong to?
Some say Pushkin quit Romanticism in year 1825. To which literary movement do his Little Tragedies (1830) belong to, then?
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How have attitudes toward "plagiarism" in literature changed since the Elizabethan era?
It's generally well-known that many of Shakespeare's dramas were "inspired" by, "plagiarised" from or otherwise "copies" of existing works. I use these terms advisedly ...
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When did the terms "Mester de Clerecía" and "Mester de Juglaría" start to be used?
Mester de Juglaría was a genre of Spanish literature from the 12th-13th centuries, which was transmitted orally by travelling entertainers (juglares). It was later surpassed by the Mester de Clerecía, ...
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Is A Supplement to the Journey to the West from the 17th century the oldest Chinese work of literature involving time travel?
A Supplement to the Journey to the West is a Chinese novel from around 1640 that was written as a type of addendum to the great classic novel Journey to the West. Journey to the West is set during the ...
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What is the ethical philosophy of European Romanticism?
The ethics of (secular) humanism is consequentialist 1, arguably epicurean 2 . I believe the ethics of the European Enlightenment could be said epicureanism also.
But what is the ethics of European ...
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The American Transcendentalism and the European Romantic movement of the 19th century
In the paragraph concerning the American Transcendentalism movement, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists the following features defining this movement:
emphasis on the subjective nature of ...
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What is the ethical philosophy of American transcendentalism?
The ethics of (secular) humanism is consequentialist [1], arguably epicurean [2] .
I believe the ethics of the European Enlightenment could be said epicureanism also.
But what is the ethics of ...
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What was the first school comedy?
Does anyone know what the earliest example of a comedy set at a school was?
I imagine there would have been written-down short humorous anecdotes about school for as long as school has existed. And ...
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To what extent (if any) was beat literature a deliberate rejection of modernism?
A key point of modernism is that it was self-consciously "artistic" in the sense that it deliberately sought to find new literary forms, built on and alluding to existing works in the canon. ...
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Romanticism and knowledge/intellectualism
What is the relationship between romanticism and (the importance of) knowledge, intellectualism?
For instance, the Enlightenment thinkers put great emphasis on the importance of knowledge.
Voltaire ...
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The Beat-Generation and anti-intellectualism
We can read on the Wikipedia article of the Beat Generation that this movement has been considered unintellectual/anti-intellectual:
The Beat Generation was met with scrutiny and assigned many
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Is spirituality/mysticism an inherent feature of the Beat Generation?
Is spirituality/mysticism an inherent feature of the Beat Generation?
I know Burroughs was fond of magic all of his life, and that Ginsberg was a Buddhist, but I am not sure whether the Beat ...
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What is the earliest work with the time-loop trope?
The film "Groundhog Day" has a plot centered around a character whose day repeats exactly the same way each day, and upon waking retains memory of the previous day. This is what I call a "time-loop," ...
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What does postmodernism mean in terms of literature?
In trying to learn about literature I have frequently encountered the idea of postmodernism. But as I have little humanities experience I have had trouble getting my head around the concept. Can ...
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How does one count syllables in medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry?
I'm trying to figure out how to count syllables in medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas. I've tried to find it in the book A poesía lírica galego-portuguesa by Giuseppe Tavani, which I found in my ...
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What was the first picaresque novel in Italian literature?
The first picaresque novel in European literature was the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes, which was first published in 1554. The section on the sources of Lazarillo de Tormes in the Wikipedia on ...
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Stage whisper-dominated plays
Among plays that have been written and performed before an audience, what is the largest proportion of any play script that is directed to be performed in stage whispers?
I'm interested to know if ...
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Short-length science fiction comeback since 2017/2018?
Has there been a resurgence of short literary science fiction novels since late 2017 or early 2018? "Short" here refers to works as at most 200 pages. Literary science fiction is science ...
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In what way is Jorge Amado's Home Is the Sailor a modernist novel?
The Wikipedia article about Jorge Amado's Home Is the Sailor / Os velhos marinheiros ou o capitão de longo curso describes this work as a "Brazilian modernist novel". The corresponding ...
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How long has Pan Tadeusz been compulsory reading in Polish schools?
Pan Tadeusz or Master Thaddeus, or the Last Foray in Lithuania: A Nobility's Tale of the Years 1811–1812, in Twelve Books of Verse is an epic poem by the Polish author Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), ...
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Has any memoir of the "Cultural Revolution" ever been exposed as a fake?
Yesterday, I asked When was the first time a Holocaust memoir or diary was exposed as a fraud?
The "Cultural Revolution" in China in the years 1966–1976 killed an unknown number of people (...
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Origin of the phrase “back when the animals could still speak” in Dutch fables or fairy tales
In Dutch, some fables or fairy tales (or both) begin with the words "[lang geleden] toen de dieren nog spraken / konden spreken", i.e. "[a long time ago] back when the animals still ...
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When was the first time a Holocaust memoir or diary was exposed as a fraud?
In my previous question, I asked Who rebutted Raul Hilberg's allegation that Man's Search for Meaning was a deception? Viktor Frankl's book is not generally regarded as a deception or a fraud. Several ...
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When did detective fiction become primarily about murder?
I was reading George Orwell's essay "Raffles and Mrs Blandish" and came across this quotation,
"Some of the early detective stories do not even contain a murder. The Sherlock Holmes ...
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Who introduced the term close reading in the context of literature?
The Wikipedia article Close reading discusses the history of the concept and the influence of I. A. Richards and others on the New Criticism:
American New Critics in the 1930s and 1940s anchored ...
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Was it so unusual for the time for Journey's End to have no leading lady?
When R.C. Sherriff first wrote his play Journey's End, set in the trenches of the First World War, he had difficulty getting it produced, as theatre managers in the West End didn't want to show a play ...
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What fictional series has the longest release to completion?
I am being inspired by George R.R. Martin and his A Song of Ice and Fire series which is currently at 24 years (A Game of Thrones was released in 1996) since the publication of the first work in the ...
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Is "The Blazing World" written in a standard style for Cavendish's time?
I've been assigned The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish to read in my literature class. The first thing that struck me about the writing is how long the sentences are. It takes a mental settling-in ...
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Why is Georg Büchner considered such an important figure in German literature?
Georg Büchner was recently proposed as a topic challenge for Lit.SE, and both that proposal and his Wikipedia page concur that he is considered an important figure in the history of German literature, ...
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Would "most unkindest" have been considered poor grammar in Shakespeare's time?
One of the famous lines from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, describing Brutus's stab to Caesar, is:
This was the most unkindest cut of all
Nowadays, it would be considered incorrect grammar to combine ...
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Was Whitman the first poet to write in sentence fragments?
One aspects of some modern poets is that they sometimes write sentences without main verbs or no main verb in the main clause. I'm not talking about interjections or sentences where an implied 'be' ...
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What is "epic caesura" in French "chansons de geste"?
I'm reading the book La chanson de geste by Jean Rychner. In a certain passage, the expression "epic caesura" ("césure épique" in the French original) appears, which I don't ...
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Is the first use of "burp" in children's stories, "Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories"?
Is Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories the first children's book to use "burp"?
As said by Dr. Seuss himself about that book:
"'I used the word burp, and nobody had ever burped before ...
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Has anastrophe decreased in frequency during the period of Modern English?
Anastrophe, the changing of usual subject-verb-object order for poetic reasons, is something that, anecdotally, strikes me as less frequent nowadays than in older writing from, say, the 19th century. ...
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How do you classify a writer as a ??th century writer?
Is there a common method to adscribe a writer/painter/person as belonging to a certain century?
As in "Herman Melville was a 19th century writer who...". Is it only used in such clear cases ...
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Which literature work took the longest time in its author's life (finished or not)
As far as I know Goethe has that title with Faust (this site tells that it spanned 57 years).
So, is it the record; or are there any other works took longer? Unfinished works are also considered to ...
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First "female Death" [closed]
We all love Aunt Teleute, but she's probably not the first female anthropomorphic personification of Death (methinks "The Death of Captain Marvel" came long before Vertigo, and an obscure &...
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Since when did Merlin have an owl?
I was reading some ten-year-old comments on a Q&A about owls in Harry Potter and learned that some versions of the Arthurian legend have the wizard Merlin possessing an owl which is called ...
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Does the Epic of Gilgamesh have a continuous cultural history?
Over 4000 years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh was first told and written down on clay tablets.
Today, as far as I understand, the story is known from the discovery of those tablets in recent centuries.
...
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The Boy and the Rattlesnake: What's the origin of this Cherokee fable?
There's a commonly told "Cherokee" fable about a boy and a rattlesnake. What's the origin of this fable? Where do we see it first see it in print and does it indeed go back to Cherokee ...
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Why did Carl Jung write "Man and his symbols" in English?
Any specific reasons for Jung and his colleagues to write this book in English? The majority of his writings seem to be in German and most of his colleagues seem German speaking as well.
I'm not sure ...
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Read Hero with a Thousand Faces before or after relevant epics?
The question Is there "required" background reading for "The Hero With a Thousand Faces"? got me part of the way there, but I'm still contemplating what the ideal reading-order ...
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The first Manx novel?
Wikipedia claims that Brian Stowell's Dunveryssyn yn Tooder-Folley (The Vampire Murders), published in 2006, was "the first full-length Manx novel". This claim is sourced to a 2006 new ...
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What are the charactaristics of German Trümmerliteratur?
Trümmerliteratur is a literary movement that originated in Germany shortly after the Second World War. What are typical charactaristics of Trümmerliteratur?
How can a work that is Trümmerliteratur be ...
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What is the earliest reference to or depiction of a police state in English literature?
In the article Henry VIII: Henry the horrible (The Independent, 12 October 2003), Marcus Tanner wrote (emphasis added),
The man now remembered as the godfather of the Anglican church continued ...
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Earliest work of fiction in which characters using telepathy can't lie
In Liu Cixin's novel The Three-Body Problem (2006/2008),
the inhabitants of the planet Trisolaris communicate with each other using telepathy and are unable to lie. In Ursula Le Guin's novel The Left ...
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How was the possessive used in Elizabethan literature?
I've been listening to a podcast called 'The History of English'. In the latest episode it touches on the use of the possessive.
In Chaucerian English the possessive was written with an '-es-' suffix, ...
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Is there actually such a thing as "OCR-pirated" books?
A recent answer/comment to a different question prompted me to ask this: Why does Tolkien use neither quotes nor cursive writing, and all lower-case, in this specific "quote"?
Somebody seems ...
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