Talk:History of literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

History of literature is part of WikiProject Literature, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Literature on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Literature Portal
B This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale.
(If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)
Top This article has been rated as top-importance on the importance scale.

Contents

[edit] Rewrite

This is a page in need of a comprehensive rewrite. If nobody tackles it soon, I will turn my attention from the Norse & Celtic mythologies to this. user:sjc

we can certainly work on it together ;) --dgd
it needs help. I'm 'roughing it' from my own studies and dim memories, plus a bit of Boorstin to provide guides

OK, it has surfaced again. I will have a good think about it and see what can be done. user:sjc ---

This really is a lot worse than I first thought: eg:

For nearly 1400 years very little new was generated in the written arts.

er. This was when Rabelais was busily knocking out Gargantua and Pantagruel, Beowulf was written, Le Morte d'Arthur, the Mabinogion, the Heimskringla, etc, etc. I fear this is going to need some serious pruning and attention to the ethnocentric biases of the original. user:sjc

[edit] New Wikiproject!

Hello all, I have just created a brand new Wikiproject for Literature (there's not even any text in the entry :) ) and I would like to incorporate this article, and all related articles, into that Project - please see Wikipedia:WikiProject and the Talk page for more info. I would much appreciate ongoing contributions and thoughts! Thanks. Simonides 11:31, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Restructure

I have restructured this because over half the sections were concerned with western literature. Hope to add some content over the next few weeks. Filiocht 10:18, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Writing content of sections

At the moment I'm writing within the sections which already exist but later, when I've got the details in there, I think it will make more sense to merge the "New World" bits into the European ones under the collective name of "literature in the European languages". The language the work is written in has more bearing upon it than the geographical location or the nationality of the writer. For the moment I'll carry on separating European writers from American, Canadian, Latin American and Australasian etc ones.

--wayland 13:45, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

First of all, great work you're doing. I had hoped to do more on this article myself, but have been busy with other things. I agree that a language focus may be good for western and Arabic lit, but wonder if you'd want to go that route for, say, India or Chinese-language writing in Japan? And how reflect the fact that Romanticism or Modernism transcend both national and linguistic boundaries? Probably a flexible mix of language, nationality, period and cultural grouping is best? Filiocht 15:36, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)

I'd just like to note that there's a big difference between a narrative history and a timeline of dates, texts, and authors. Right now the article is a weird mix of the two, which is fine because any of these is much better than the endless "to be added" tags that this article used to be. But at some point it might be better to move the timeline content to its own article and replace it with brief paragraphs that pick out truly significant stuff. -- Rbellin 19:37, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Aeschylus

The formulation of the sentence

'A playwright named Aeschylus changed Western literature forever when he introduced the ideas of dialogue and interacting characters to playwriting. In doing so, he essentially invented "drama": '

is a bit unlucky; Aeschylus is the earliest great playwright to have survived from literature, which in the case of early literature does not necessarily mean he was the one who invented dialogue or "drama".