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 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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Would the chorus leader typically speak/sing along with the chorus in classical Greek plays?
I had assumed that the chorus leader would speak along with the chorus. He is a part of it, after all. However, when I asked my literature professor on a whim he wasn't completely sure. Doing my own ...
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Why did so few writers seem to work as waiters before the 20th century?
It seems that nowadays working in a restaurant is a very common job for someone who may not have found work requiring more specific qualifications.
Yet it seems that of the various trades and ...
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What is the oldest preserved stage direction?
A recent answer from Gareth Rees mentioned that:
If Classical Greek drama ever had stage directions, our manuscript sources do not preserve them
Which made me wonder: what is the oldest stage ...
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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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What is the oldest book written in braille?
What is the oldest complete book written in braille?
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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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What was the first unauthorized sequel?
I'm curious about the role authorial authority has played in the past, especially what the authors themselves believed it to be.
Therefore I'm looking for earlier examples of works meeting the ...
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How did Indian literature influence Japanese literature?
The Wikipedia article on Japanese literature opens with the following sentences about the influence of other cultures and bodies of literature on the (nascent?) Japanese literature:
Early works of ...
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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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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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What is the provenance of Story 6 in Day 2 of the Decameron, set against a backdrop of 13th-century Sicily?
Day 2, Story 6 of the Decameron is set against a political backdrop of 13th-century Sicily: it begins with the defeat of King Manfred at Benevento by the new king Charles, and the main characters are ...
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How was Il-Kantilena "found", and how is its author known?
The 15th-century Maltese poem "Il-Kantilena" is said to have been "found" in the 1960s by two Maltese historians, but the above-linked Wikipedia page, and other sources I've found ...
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What started barons being represented more negatively in literature?
I've noticed that barons more often are portrayed negatively in comparison to lords or royalty (though the latter is a mixed bag). Come to think of it, I can't think of a baron portrayed in a positive ...
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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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What was the first picaresque novel in Portuguese literature?
The first picaresque novel in European literature was the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes, which was first published in 1554. The Wikipedia article about the genre does not mention any examples in ...
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How long has Khamba Thoibi been considered a national epic of the Manipuris?
Khamba Thoibi is "a legendary Meitei language epic poem" and "is regarded as the national epic of the Manipuris". The Wikipedia article about Meitei literature makes no mention of ...
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Which French author or critic claimed that Racine and La Fontaine could not be understood by foreigners?
Jean Racine (1639–1699) is considered "one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille". The Wikipedia article about the playwright contains a ...
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How did the Epic of Manas become a national epic of the Kyrgyz people?
The Epic of Manas "is a traditional epic poem dating to the 18th century but claimed by Kyrgyz tradition to be much older". The footer of the Wikipedia article about the epic treats it as an ...
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