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].
238 questions
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Predecessors/Inspirations of Scheinriesen (Illusionary Giants)
A "Scheinriese" (illusory giant), most notably Mr. Tur-Tur from Michael Ende's Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, is a being which when seen from a distance appears to be a giant, inadvertently ...
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How and why did the story of King Cnut change?
The 11th-century king Cnut/Knut/Canute of Denmark, Norway, and England is today best known for the story of how he sat on the beach commanding the waves to turn back. The original account of this ...
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Why does Germanic poetry have special rules regarding alliteration with words starting with the letter s?
In Germanic poetry such as the edda and Beowulf, consonant cluster words starting with the letter s have special rules about alliteration.
From Wikipedia, using Minkova 2003 as a source:
The ...
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Origin of the story of Gilbert and the Saracen maid
A popular legend about the parents of Thomas Becket (1118–1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, is retold by Charles Dickens in A Child's History of England:
Once upon a time, a worthy merchant of London, ...
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How did Middleton's Microcynicon survive the Bishop's Ban of 1599?
Microcynicon: Six Snarling Satires is an early work of satire by Thomas Middleton. It was one of the nine works specifically singled out for censorship, i.e. burning by the hangman, by the Bishop's ...
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How were plays in Shakespeare's time advertised?
How were plays in Tudor or Jacobean England advertised (e.g. did they use posters, street-hawkers, etc.)? And how much information would these advertisements have contained?
Would an advertisement ...
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In what way were Stuart court masques examples of neoplatonic idealism?
In his introduction to Women Beware Women and Other Plays (Oxford University Press, 1999, page ix), Richard Dutton writes,
It seems unlikely that Thomas Middleton would have shared the neo-Platonic ...
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Did the Enlightenment "think of art primarily as self-expression"?
In Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri argues that raga music is modernist in that it is non-representational: a raga does not depict anything other than itself. He supports this claim by drawing on the ...
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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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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 rules of alliteration in Germanic poetry as they pertain to single syllable triple consonant clusters starting with the letter s
In Germanic poetry such as the edda and Beowulf, consonant cluster words starting with the letter s have special rules about alliteration.
From Wikipedia, using Minkova 2003 as a source:
The ...
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Symbolism of locks and keys in blues
Thomas Foster's book How to Read Literature Like a Professor spends a lot of time discussing various types of symbolism. Chapter 16 is titled "It's All About Sex …" and gives examples of ...
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Has a parody of a work of literature ever become more successful than the original work?
I was thinking of this when I read Nineteen-Neighty-Four, a fanfic with My Little Pony ponies in a 1984-ish world.
Parodies can be really successful as a way of challenging another work, or the ideas ...
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Did Goldoni decide to set the action of "La bottega del caffè" during a Venetian carnival for the sake of verisimilitude?
I know that Goldoni is the great reformer of Italian theater, who transformed the 'commedia dell'arte' into
true and ‘modern’ theatre texts, entirely scripted, with the various roles defined and ...
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Is the fact that "La bottega del caffè" is an ensemble comedy an innovation by Goldoni?
Reading La bottega del caffè, one striking fact is that if you ask who the main characters are, the answer is that there are none. It is truly what we would call today an ensemble piece: there are ...
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Was The Glass Menagerie the first memory play, or merely the first instance of the phrase?
There seems little dispute that Tennessee Williams coined the phrase "memory play" to describe his play The Glass Menagerie, in which one of the characters is also the narrator of events ...
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Did Tolkien invent Bilbo saving the Dwarves but forgetting about himself?
Bear with me a moment. I was watching the James Bond parody "Our Man Flint" (1966) starring James Coburn. At the end, he puts all of his female companions into steel barrels and sends them ...
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What arguments have scholars used to characterise Kafka's The Metamorphosis as magical realism?
In comments below the question What style are Kafka's novels?, Peter Shor said,
Kafka has been characterized as "magical realism". On the other hand, there are lots of people who disagree ...
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Was pretending to be an abridgement of a made-up work invented by William Goldman?
William Goldman's The Princess Bride is famous (among other reasons) for a literary device it employs - it pretends to be an abridgment (or "the good parts version") of a longer work by S. ...
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When and where was the first literary sketch published?
A literary sketch or simply sketch is a literary piece of writing that is generally shorter than a short story and contains little, if any, plot. According to this source, the genre was introduced ...
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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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Historical King Ina and Shakespeare's King Lear in the writings of Thomas Hardy
In Thomas Hardy's short(ish) story "The Withered Arm", one of his descriptions of the Wessex countryside features the following cryptic allusion:
It was a long walk; thick clouds made the ...
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Until what year was Machiavelli's The Prince banned in England?
Machiavelli's treatise The Prince, written in the early 16th century and first published in 1532, was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. According to Robert Bireley, quoted on Wikipedia,
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Was Ibsen really so influential in the history of theatre?
One passage of Ibsen's Wikipedia page reads as follows:
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others, and which we see in the theatre ...
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What happened to the 'New Novel' trend? Did it live into the 21st century?
I don't remember reading any novels written by 21st century authors similar to those of the 'New Novel' movement. Maybe Enjoe Toh counts, but his works are more sci-fi rather than 'pure' fiction. Did ...
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What is the origin of the circle story technique?
When was the circle story technique first used? By circle story technique I mean a story that reveals the end at the beginning of the story and then jumps backwards to tell the story from its start.
I'...
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Literary background of being poisoned via the ear?
Shakespeare's Hamlet famously features a character being killed by having poison poured into his ear. This unusual method of murder has been much referenced in other works since Shakespeare, but where ...
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Since when has Shakespeare's "Scottish play" been considered unlucky?
In theatrical superstition, Shakespeare's play Macbeth is considered to be unlucky, to the extent that even saying its name more than necessary may bring bad luck: hence the tradition of actors ...
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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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What is the strongest theoretical epistemology about literary (or cultural) “periods”?
Discussions of periods like “Romanticism” and general claims about what people were motivated by or what traits distinguished art in that time strike me as requiring a rigorous justification. If we ...
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Was there a unified "First World War poetry" movement (during the war itself)?
There is a massive body of literature which can collectively be called "First World War poetry", written by a huge number of poets from many different countries. Many of these poems were ...
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Who originated "The Life and Lies of xxx"?
The fictional journalist Rita Skeeter famously wrote a book The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling.
While there have been a number of subsequent ...
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Were there any kind of 'fictional' prosaic or dramatic works in ancient Israel?
From what I know, the main form of 'art' in ancient Israel was musical - singing, dancing and playing instruments. This was very widespread back then, even extending to many biblical promises about ...
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What is an epic and why is there “only one epic in English Language so far”?
I’m quite familiar with novels and stories, if my personal view is concerned I would say that story is just a compact and summarised form of novel. The level of detail in novels is, obviously, much ...
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Unique words/vocabulary - Sufficient or necessary condition to determine original source?
Suppose we have two texts that are two different languages of the same story. One is the original, one is a translation. We wish to determine which one was the original. Among the more useful data ...
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What is the most recent epistolary novel written in English that consists entirely out of back and forth letters between two characters?
This question probably has a somewhat unusual backstory, which is perhaps worth describing before asking the question. It hopefully clarifies and motivates the question itself.
A couple of months ago, ...
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Examples of Zeus's Immoral Nature [closed]
In The Odyssey, Zeus happily allows Poseidon to turn a ship into stone, killing everyone aboard. I think it's safe to say most people alive today would consider this immoral.
What are some other ...
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What's the oldest example of the floating timeline device in fiction?
Many modern animated TV series use a floating timeline, in which the characters do not age, but the time period in which the show is set adjusts to match when the episodes are created. The Simpsons is ...
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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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Why isn't Arthur Conan Doyle considered a first-rate writer? [closed]
Why isn't Arthur Conan Doyle considered a first-rate writer?
I find the style of the Sherlock Holmes books astounding. Here are some of the sentences I liked:
Holmes lay with his gaunt figure ...
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Use of "limited third-person point of view", vs "omniscient third person point of view" over the past century or so
I notice that a lot of popular recent fiction,
for example Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" , and George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" are written in limited/subjective third-person point of ...
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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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Does romanticism tend towards anti-science and anti-technology?
Talking about English, German and French romanticism.
Romanticism started with someone like Rousseau who wrote Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), "which argued that the arts and sciences ...
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Is there some kind of blossoming towards the existentialist vision in French pre-Romantic poetry?
I remember to have read somewhere, but, unfortunately, I don't remember where, that in certain pre-Romantic French poet one can find some kind of blossoming towards the existentialist vision.
Does ...
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Was romanticism ambiguous towards realism?
Was romanticism ambiguous towards realism?
This paper (Wellek, 1961) synthesizes the view of the German romantic poet and philosopher Schlegel about realism:
In the Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant ...
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Distinction between author and narrator/speaker
Has a distinction always been made between the narrator/speaker of a poem, novel etc. and the author? Or is this more of a modern concept? Did critics and readers in, say, the Victorian age ...
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What classic mystery novels and stories led to "the butler did it" becoming a cliché?
"The butler did it" is a common trope indicating a hackneyed solution to a mystery. I have read several classic mysteries from the 1920s and earlier (Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Sayers, etc.)...
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Symbolism and romanticism as literary movements
I'm trying to understand the difference between Symbolism and Romanticism as literary movements. As I understand it, the symbolists explicitly wanted to distance themselves from the romantics.
But if ...
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Did the death of Thomas Chatterton influence Romanticism?
The beginning of the 19th century is known as the Romantic period. While I know that Chatterton wasn't the first romantic, would it be plausible to say that Chatterton's death gave ignition to ...
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