History Of Literature

Literature is a work of art; an art that stirs different emotions and bounds you to fall in love, feel revolted, motivated and satiated.

Words are a strong expression of emotions and when they take the form of a story or perhaps poetry they make you feel connected to that character and changes your perspective towards life.

Well for all the bibliophiles out there literature is a way of isolating ourselves from the materialistic world but literation itself holds a vast history.

It has been used as a form of entertainment from the ancient times when the world was blissfully unacquainted with the term technology.

In ancient era buying a book was considered as a luxury because scripts used to handwritten on a palmers leaf.

The earliest examples of written literature appear to have originated in ancient Mesopotamia. The Sumerian civilization first developed writing around 3400 B.C., when they began making markings on clay tablets in a script known as cuneiform.

The Renaissance marked the beginning of new dawn for literature in the 15th century when Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press which altered the European economy and well buying a book was not a luxury anymore.

A novel is a modern form of literature which is born from the invention of the printing press.

Novels that started publishing in the 17th century were basically focussed on the life story of a common man without any emphasis on the life of elite people or an influential person.

During the industrialization era of Europe Charles Dicken came out with his novel hard times which showed the terrible effect of industrialization on the life of people.

The English novel written at thebeginning were by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722),though John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) are also contenders, while earlier works such as Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and even the "Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have been suggested. Another important early novel is Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, which is both a satire of human nature, as well as a parody of travelers' tales like Robinson Crusoe.

Soon novel became a medium of bringing the issues of social evil. Hence, a new genre of writing evolved, progressive writing and feminism.

The famous novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte was based on the story of an independent and assertive woman with a rebellious nature. When girls were expected to behave as porcelain dolls speaking only when asked to, in that era Charlotte came with a character which was blunt with her replies and had a way of pointing out the hypocrisy of elders.

The life of domestic females was also highlighted in some novel as penned by Jane system in her pride and prejudice.

The novel became established as the dominant literary form during the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837-1901). Victorian novelists portrayed middle-class, virtuous heroes responding to society and learning wrong from right through a series of human errors.

Then came the era of modern literature which comprises modern literature and contemporary literature which was based on questioning the existence of God, the supremacy of human and nature of reality.