Institute of International Realations of Moldova Faculty of Foreign Languages

ACADEMIC PORTFOLIO Popov Irina, 1LM2, group 103 A subject

HISTORY OF WORLD LITERATURE

Chisinu -2012-

Introduction in History of World Literature World literature is sometimes used to refer to the sum total of the worlds national literatures, but usually it refers to the circulation of works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. Often used in the past primarily for masterpieces of Western European literature, world literature today is increasingly seen in global context. Readers today have access to an unprecedented range of works from around the world in excellent translations, and since the mid-1990s a lively debate has grown up concerning both the aesthetic and the political values and limitations of an emphasis on global processes over national traditions. The history of literature is the historical development of writings in prose or poetry which attempts to provide entertainment, enlightenment, orinstruction to the reader/hearer/observer, as well as the development of the literary techniques used in the communication of these pieces. Not all writings constitute literature. Some recorded materials, such as compilations of data (e.g., a check register) are not considered literature, and this article relates only to the evolution of the works defined above.

Literary Periods
Bronze Age literature Sumerian Egyptian Akkadian Sanskrit Classical literatures Chinese Greek Hebrew Latin Early Medieval literature Matter of Rome Matter of France Matter of Britain Medieval literature Old Bulgarian Old English Middle English Arabic Byzantine Early Modern literature Renaissance literature Baroque literature Modern literature 18th century 19th century 20th century 21st century

The beginnings of literature

Literature and writing, though obviously connected, are not synonymous. The very first writings from ancient Sumer by any reasonable definition do not constitute literaturethe same is true of some of the early Egyptian hieroglyphics or the thousands of logs from ancient Chinese regimes. Scholars have always disagreed concerning when written record-keeping became more like "literature" than anything else; the definition is largely subjective. Moreover, it must be born in mind that, given the significance of distance as a cultural isolator in earlier centuries, the historical development of literature did not occur at an even pace across the world. The problems of creating a uniform global history of literature are compounded by the fact that many texts have been lost over the millennia, either deliberately, by accident, or by the total disappearance of the originating culture. Much has been written, for example, about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in the 1st century BC, and the innumerable key texts which are believed to have been lost forever to the flames. The deliberate suppression of texts (and often their authors) by organisations of either a spiritual or a temporal nature further shrouds the subject.

Certain primary texts, however, may be isolated which have a qualifying role as literature's first stirrings. Very early examples are Epic of Gilgamesh, in its Sumerian version predating 2000 BC, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead written down in the Papyrus of Ani in approximately 1250 BC but probably dates from about the 18th century BC. Ancient Egyptian literature was not included in early studies of the history of literature because the writings of Ancient Egypt were not translated into European languages until the 19th century when the Rosetta stone was deciphered. Many texts handed down by oral tradition over several centuries before they were fixed in written form are difficult or impossible to date. The core of the Rigveda may date to the mid 2nd millennium BC. The Pentateuch is traditionally dated to the 15th century, although modern scholarship estimates its oldest part to date to the 10th century BC at the earliest. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey date to the 8th century BC and mark the beginning of Classical Antiquity. They also stand in an oral tradition that stretches back to the late Bronze Age. Indian ruti texts post-dating the Rigveda (such as the Yajurveda, the Atharvaveda and the Brahmanas), as well as the Hebrew Tanakh and the mystical collection of poems attributed to Lao Tze, the Tao te Ching, date to the Iron Age, but their
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dating is difficult and controversial. The great Hindu epics were also transmitted orally, likely predating the Maurya period.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Dozens of stories about Gilgamesh circulated throughout the ancient Middle East. Archaeologists have discovered the earliest ones, inscribed on clay tablets in the Sumerian language before 2000 B.C. Other tablets tell stories about him in the Elamite, Hurrian, and Hittite tongues. Over time, many of those stories were consolidated into a large, epic work. The most complete known version of this long poem was found in Nineveh, in the ruins of the library of Assurbanipal, the last great king of the Assyrian empire. Assurbanipal was undoubtedly a despot and a warmonger, but he was also a tireless archivist and collectorwe owe much of our knowledge about ancient Mesopotamia to his efforts. The Epic of Gilgamesh is written in Akkadian, the Babylonians language, on eleven tablets, with a fragmentary appendix on a twelfth. The tablets actually name their author, Sin-Leqi-Unninni, whose name translates to Moon god, accept my plea. This poet/editor must have completed his work sometime before 612 B.C., when the Persians conquered the Assyrian Empire and destroyed Nineveh. The Epic of Gilgamesh is more than just an archaeological curiosity. Despite its innumerable omissions and obscurities, its strange cast of gods, and its unfamiliar theory about the creation of the universe, the story of Gilgamesh is powerful and gripping. An exciting adventure that celebrates kinship between men, it asks what price people pay to be civilized and questions the proper role of a king, and it both acknowledges and scrutinizes the attractions of earthly fame. Most of all, Gilgamesh describes the existential struggles of a superlatively strong man who must reconcile himself to his mortality and find meaning in his life despite the inevitability of death.

The Egiptian Literature Egyptian literature traces its beginnings to ancient Egypt and is some of the earliest known literature. Indeed, the Egyptians were the first culture to develop literature as we know it today, that is, the book. Ancient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from Ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. It represents the oldest corpus of Egyptian literature. Along with Sumerian literature, it is considered the world's earliest literature.

The book of the Dead The Book of the Dead is the modern name of an ancient Egyptian funerary text, used from the beginning of the New Kingdom (around 1550 BC) to around 50 BC.The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw is translated as "Book of Coming Forth by Day". Another translation would be "Book of emerging forth into the Light". The text consists of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife. The Book of the Dead was part of a tradition of funerary texts which includes the earlier Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts, which were painted onto objects, not papyrus. Some of the spells included were drawn from these older works and date to the 3rd millennium BC. Other spells were composed later in Egyptian history, dating to the Third Intermediate Period (11th to 7th centuries BC). A number of the spells which made up the Book continued to be inscribed on tomb walls and sarcophagi, as had always been the spells from which they originated. The Book of the Dead was placed in the coffin or burial chamber of the deceased. There was no single or canonical Book of the Dead. The surviving papyri contain a varying selection of religious and magical texts and vary considerably in their illustration. Some people seem to have commissioned their own copies of the Book of the Dead, perhaps choosing the spells they thought most vital in their own progression to the afterlife. The Book of the Dead was most commonly written inhieroglyphic or hieratic script on a papyrus scroll, and often illustrated with vignettes depicting the deceased and their journey into the afterlife.

Hebrew Literature
Hebrew literature consists of ancient, medieval, and modern writings in the Hebrew language. It is one of the primary forms of Jewish literature, though there have been cases of literature written in Hebrew by non-Jews.Hebrew literature was produced in many different parts of the world throughout the medieval and modern eras, while contemporary Hebrew literature is largely Israeli literature.

The Bible
The Origins of the Hebrew Bible and Its Components

The sacred books that make up the anthology modern scholars call the Hebrew Bible - and Christians call the Old Testament - developed over roughly a millennium; the oldest texts appear to come from the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. War songs such as Exodus 15 and Judges 5 are very archaic Hebrew and celebrate Israelite victories from the time preceding the Israelite monarchy under David and Solomon. However, most of the other biblical texts are somewhat later. And they are edited works, collections of various sources intricately and artistically woven together.

The five books of Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy), for example, traditionally are ascribed to Moses. But by the eighteenth century, many European scholars noticed problems with that assumption. Not only does Deuteronomy end with an account of Moses' death (a tough assignment for any writer to describe his or her own demise), but the entire Pentateuch shows anomalies of style that are hard to explain if only one author is involved. By the nineteenth century, most scholars agreed that the Pentateuch consisted of four sources woven together. This notion of four sources came to be known as the Documentary Hypothesis, and, in various forms, it has been the prevailing theory for the past two hundred years. Israel thus created four independent strains of literature about its own origins, all drawing on oral tradition in varying degrees, and each developed over time. They were combined together to form our Pentateuch sometime in the sixth century BCE.

Latin Literature

The Iliad

The Iliad (sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege; the earlier events, such as the gathering of warriors for the siege, the cause of the war, and related concerns tend to appear near the beginning. Then the epic narrative takes up events prophesied for the future, such as Achilles' looming death and the sack of Troy, prefigured and alluded to more and more vividly, so that when it reaches an end, the poem has told a more or less complete tale of the Trojan War. Along with the Odyssey, also attributed to Homer, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, and its written version is usually dated to around the eighth century BC.[1] The Iliad contains over 15,000 lines, and is written in Homeric Greek, a literary amalgam of Ionic Greek with other dialects.

Medieval Literature Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages (encompassing the one thousand years from the fall of the Western Roman Empire ca. AD 500 to the beginning of the Florentine Renaissance in the late 15th century). The literature of this time was composed of religious writings as well as secular works. Just as in
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modern literature, it is a complex and rich field of study, from the utterly sacred to the exuberantly profane, touching all points in-between. Because of the wide range of time and place it is difficult to speak in general terms without oversimplification, and thus the literature is best characterized by its place of origin and/or language, as well as its genre.

Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia) is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative and allegorical vision of the afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. On the surface, the poem describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; but at a deeper level, it represents allegorically the soul's journey towards God. At this deeper level, Dante draws on medieval Christian theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy and the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called "the Summa in verse."

The work was originally simply titled Comeda and was later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio. The first printed edition to add the word divine to the title was that of the Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce, published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari.

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, changed into twelve books (in the manner of the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification. The poem concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men."Paradise Lost is often considered one of the greatest literary works in the English language.
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Renaissance The Renaissance (UK: /rnesns/, US: /rn sns/ , French pronunciation: [ n s s] French: Renaissance, Italian: Rinascimento, from , rinascere "to be reborn")was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. Though the invention of printing sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe. As a cultural movement, it encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch, the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform. In politics the Renaissance contributed the development of the conventions of diplomacy, and in science an increased reliance on observation that would flower later in the Scientific Revolution beginning in the 17th century. Traditionally, this intellectual transformation has resulted in the Renaissance being viewed as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man". There is a consensus that the Renaissance began in Florence, Tuscany in the 14th century.Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time; its political structure; the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici; and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of Renaissance It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.
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Some have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for the classical age,while social and economic historians of the longue dure especially have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, linked, as Panofsky himself observed, "by a thousand tie

The Decameron
The Decameron, also called Prince Galehaut (Italian: Il Decameron, cognominato Prencipe Galeotto) is a 14th-century medieval allegory by Giovanni Boccaccio, told as a frame story encompassing 100 tales by ten young people. Boccaccio probably began composing the work in 1350, and finished it in 1351 or 1353. The bawdy tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary import, it documents life in 14th-century Italy. The book's primary title exemplifies Boccaccio's fondness for Greek philology: Decameron combines two Greek words, Greek: dka ("ten") and Greek: hmra ("day"), to form a term that means "ten-day event".Ten days is the time period in which the characters of the frame story tell their tales. Throughout Decameron the mercantile ethic prevails and predominates. The commercial and urban values of quick wit, sophistication, and intelligence are treasured, while the vices of stupidity and dullness are cured, or punished. While these traits and values may seem obvious to the modern reader, they were an emerging feature in Europe with the rise of urban centers and a monetized economic system beyond the traditional rural feudal and monastery systems which placed greater value on piety and loyalty. Beyond the unity provided by the frame narrative, Decameron provides a unity in philosophical outlook. Throughout runs the common medieval theme of Lady Fortune, and how quickly one can rise and fall through the external influences of the "Wheel of Fortune". Boccaccio had been educated in the tradition of Dante's Divine Comedy which used various levels of allegory to show the connections between the literal events of the story and the Christian message. However, Decameron uses Dante's model not to educate the reader but to satirize this method of learning. The Roman Catholic Church, priests, and religious belief become the satirical source of
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comedy throughout. This was part of a wider historical trend in the aftermath of the Black Death which saw widespread discontent with the church. Many details of the Decameron are infused with a medieval sense of numerological and mystical significance. For example, it is widely believed that the seven young women are meant to represent the Four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude) and the Three Theological Virtues (Faith, Hope, and Charity). It is further supposed that the three men represent the classical Greek tripartite division of the soul (Reason, Spirit, and Appetite, see Book IV of Republic). Boccaccio himself notes that the names he gives for these ten characters are in fact pseudonyms chosen as "appropriate to the qualities of each". The Italian names of the seven women, in the same (most likely significant) order as given in the text, are: Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa. The men, in order, are: Panfilo, Filostrato, and Dioneo. Boccaccio focused on the naturalness of sex by combining and interlacing sexual experiences with nature. By weaving them the way he does, Boccaccio permanently places sex into the world of nature by making it seem normal.

The Banquet in the Pine Forest (1482/3) is the third painting in Sandro Botticelli's series The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, which illustrates events from the Eighth Story of the Fifth Day.

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European Classicism
Classicism evolved through interaction with other European tendencies in art. It was based on the earlier aesthetics of the Renaissance and stood in opposition to the contemporary baroque art, which was imbued with a sense of universal discord arising out of the crisis of ideals of the previous epoch. Although it continued such Renaissance traditions as reverence for antiquity, faith in reason, and idealization of harmony and measure, classicism also constituted a distinct antithesis to the Renaissance. Classicisms external harmony concealed an inner dichotomy of outlook, which despite profound differences brought it close to the baroque. The generic and the individual, the social and the personal, reason and feeling, civilization and nature, which in the Renaissance had been integrated into a single harmonious whole, were polarized in classicism and became mutually exclusive. This dichotomy reflected a new historical situation in which the spheres of political and private life began to separate and social relations became for man a force isolated and abstract. In the 17th century the idea of reason was inseparable from that of the absolutist state, which at the time, according to K. Marx, operated as universal reason (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 1, p. 254), as the civilizing center, the unifying principle of society (ibid., vol. 10, p. 431), as the force capable of restraining feudal anarchy and establishing peace and order. At the heart of the aesthetics of classicism lay principles of rationalism corresponding to the philosophical ideas of R. Descartes and the Cartesians. In accordance with these principles an artistic work was regarded as an artificial creation consciously wrought, rationally organized, and logically constructed. Advocating the imitation of nature, classicists held that the indispensable condition for its attainment was the strict observance of immutable rules derived from classical poetics (Aristotle, Horace) and art. These rules determined the laws of artistic form, in which the artists rational creative will was manifested, transforming life into a beautiful, logically harmonious, and lucid work of art. The artistic transformation of nature into that which is beautiful and ennobling also represented a higher cognition of nature; art was called upon to show the ideal logic of the universe, often concealed behind external chaos and the disorder of reality. Reason, apprehending the ideal harmony, was a higher phenomenon than individual characteristics and the diversity of life. For classicism, only the generic, the immutable, and the timeless possessed aesthetic value. Classicism strove to discover and embody each phenomenons essential, permanent features; hence its interest in antiquity as an absolute, suprahistorical aesthetic norm, as well as its adherence to the principles of character types that embody certain social or spiritual forces.
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The classicists aspired to create images that were models capturing life in its ideal, eternal aspect. These images were mirrors in which the individual was transformed into the generic, the temporal into the eternal, the real into the ideal, and history into myth. The classical image portrayed what is everywhere and yet nowhere in reality. It was the triumph of reason and order over chaos. The embodiment of lofty ethical ideas in appropriately harmonious and beautiful forms imparted to works fashioned according to the canons of classicism a nuance of utopianism, conditioned also by classicisms emphasis on arts didactic and social functions. The aesthetics of classicism established a strict hierarchy of genres, the high and the low. In literature, the high genres embraced the tragedy, the epic, and the ode, and in painting the high genres were the historical, the mythological, and the religious. The themes of high genres dealt with the state or with religious history, and their heroes were monarchs, military leaders, mythological personages, and religious zealots. The everyday life of the middle class was portrayed in literature in the low genres of comedy, satire, and fable. In painting, the corresponding small genres were the landscape, portrait, and still life. Each genre had strict boundaries and precise formal features; the lofty could not be mingled with the low, the tragic with the comic, or the heroic with the everyday. Literature. The poetics of classicism began to evolve in Italy in the late Renaissance in the poetics of L. Castelvetro and J. C. Scaliger, but only in 17thcentury France, during the consolidation and flowering of absolutism, did classicism emerge as an integral artistic system. The poetics of French classicism, developing gradually in conflict with both prciosit and the burlesque, was given final, systematic expression in the Art potique (1674) of N. Boileau, who summed up the artistic experience of 17thcentury French literature. The founder of the poetry and poetics of classicism was F. Malherbe, whose language and verse reforms were adopted by the Acadmie Franaise, entrusted with creating a binding linguistic and literary canon. The leading genre of classicism was tragedy, which resolved the major social and moral problems of the age. In tragedy social conflicts were portrayed in the souls of heroes facing a choice between moral duty and passions. This conflict reflected the polarization of social and private life, a polarization that also determined the structure of the character. The generic and social, the thinking and reasoning I is contrasted with the heros immediate individual existence, and the hero, attempting to follow the dictates of reason, seems to view himself from without, introspects, is tormented by his duality, and senses the imperative of becoming equal to the ideal I. In the works of P. Corneille, this imperative merged with duty to the state. Later, in the works of J. Racine, a growing alienation from the state caused the imperative to lose its political significance and to acquire an ethical character.
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An inner sense of the coming crisis of the absolutist system is also revealed in Racines tragedies, whose ideally harmonious artistic construction contrasts with the blind and elemental passions depicted; in the face of these passions, mans reason and will are impotent. European Romanticism Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as "romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. Historical Considerations It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for Rousseau's writings throughout Europe. Imagination The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it.
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Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

Nature
"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language. For example, throughout "Song of Myself," Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in nature--"ants," "heap'd stones," and "poke-weed"--as containing divine elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural "hieroglyphic," "the handkerchief of the Lord." While particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably--nature as a healing power, nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance"--and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry. Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation. Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed.
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In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet. Wordsworth'sPrelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components. Confessional prose narratives such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Chateaubriand's Rene(1801), as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron's Childe Harold (1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type. Individualism: The Romantic Hero The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric. Consequently they opposed the character typology of neoclassical drama. In another way, of course, Romanticism created its own literary types. The hero-artist has already been mentioned; there were also heaven-storming types from Prometheus to Captain Ahab, outcasts from Cain to the Ancient Mariner and even Hester Prynne, and there was Faust, who wins salvation in Goethe's great drama for the very reasons--his characteristic striving for the unattainable beyond the morally permitted and his insatiable thirst for activity--that earlier had been viewed as the components of his tragic sin. (It was in fact Shelley's opinion that Satan, in his noble defiance, was the real hero of Milton's Paradise Lost.) The Romantic Artist in Society In another way too, the Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world around them. They were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they began to distance themselves from the public. As noted earlier, high Romantic artists interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions included social and political consciousness--as one would expect in a period of revolution, one that reacted so strongly to oppression and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with socially or politically oriented subject matter. Yet at the same time, another trend began to emerge, as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining boundaries of bourgeois life. In their private lives, they often asserted their individuality and differences in ways that were to the middle class a subject of intense interest, but also sometimes of horror. ("Nothing succeeds like excess," wrote Oscar Wilde, who, as a partial inheritor of Romantic tendencies, seemed to enjoy shocking the bourgeois, both in his literary and life styles.)
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Thus the gulf between "odd" artists and their sometimes shocked, often uncomprehending audience began to widen. Some artists may have experienced ambivalence about this situation--it was earlier pointed out how Emily Dickinson seemed to regret that her "letters" to the world would go unanswered.

Realism
The dominant paradigm in novel writing during the second half of the nineteenth century was no longer the Romantic idealism of the earlier part of the century. What took hold among the great novelists in Europe and America was a new approach to character and subject matter, a school of thought which later came to be known as Realism. On one level, Realism is precisely what it sounds like. It is attention to detail, and an effort to replicate the true nature of reality in a way that novelists had never attempted. There is the belief that the novels function is simply to report what happens, without comment or judgment. Seemingly inconsequential elements gain the attention of the novel functioning in the realist mode. From Henry James, for example, one gets a sense of being there in the moment, as a dense fabric of minute details and observations is constructed. This change in style meant that some of the traditional expectations about the novels form had to be pushed aside. In contrast to what came before, the realistic novel rests upon the strengths of its characters rather than plot or turn of phrase. The characters that the realistic school of novelists produced are some of the most famous in literary history, from Jamess Daisy Miller to Dostoyevskys Raskolnikov. They are psychologically complicated, multifaceted, and with conflicting impulses and motivations that very nearly replicate the daily tribulations of being human. Realism coincided with Victorianism, yet was a distinct collection of aesthetic principles in its own right. The realist novel was heavily informed by journalistic techniques, such as objectivity and fidelity to the facts of the matter. It is not a coincidence that many of the better known novelists of the time had concurrent occupations in the publishing industry. The idea of novel-writing as a report grew out of this marriage between literature and journalism. Another fair comparison would be to think of the realist novel as an early form of docudrama, in which fictional persons and events are intended to seamlessly reproduce the real world. The Victorian Period saw growing concern with the plight of the less fortunate in society, and the realistic novel likewise turned its attention on subjects that beforehand would not have warranted notice. The balancing act that the upwardly mobile middle class had to perform in order to retain their position in the world was a typical subject for realistic novels. There arose a subgenre of Realism called Social Realism, which in hindsight can be interpreted as Marxist and socialist ideas set forth in literature.

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The overriding concern of all realist fiction is with character. Specifically, novelists struggled to create intricate and layered characters who, as much as possible, felt as though they could be flesh and blood creatures. Much of this effect was achieved through internal monologues and a keen understanding of human psychology. Not surprisingly, the field of psychology was in the process of evolving from metaphysical quackery into a bona fide scientific pursuit. Students of the human mind were beginning to realize that an individual is composed of a network of motivations, interests, desires, and fears. How these forces interact and sometimes do battle with each other plays a large part in the development of personality. Realism, at its highest level, attempts to lay these internal struggles bare for all to see. In other words, most of the action of the realist novel is internalized. Changes in mood, in perceptions, in opinions and ideas constitute turning points or climaxes. Realist novelists eschewed many of the novels established traditions, most notably in the form of plot structure. Typically, novels follow a definite arc of events, with an identifiable climax and resolution. They are self-contained and satisfying in their symmetry. Successful careers have been built on the scaffolding of a single story arc. The school of Realism observed that life did not follow such patterns, so for them, neither should the novel. Instead of grand happenings, tragedies, and epic turns of events, the realist novel plodded steadily over a track not greatly disturbed by external circumstances. Nothing truly earth shattering happens in Jamess The Portrait of a Lady, despite it hundreds of pages. The same can be said of Dostoyevsky He composed lengthy and weighty fiction where most, if not all of the action happened in the minds of the characters. Narrative style also changed with realistic fiction. Instead of an omniscient narrator calmly describing the persons and events, readers often confront unreliable narrators who do not have all the information. Often, the narrators perceptions are colored by their own prejudices and beliefs. A popular device for many realistic novelists was the frame narrative, or the story inside a story. This device compounds the unreliable narrator by placing the reader at a further remove from the events of the novel. The purpose of all of these innovations, as with the whole of Realism, was to more accurately simulate the nature of reality unknowable, uncertain, and ever-shifting reality.

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The Human Comedy

La Comdie humaine (French pronunciation: [la kmedi ymn] , The Human Comedy) is the title of Honor de Balzac's (17991850) multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy (18151848). The Comdie humaine consists of 91 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works (some of which exist only as titles). It does not include Balzac's 5 theatrical plays or his collection of humorous tales, the "Contes drolatiques" (183237). The title of the series is usually considered an allusion to Dante's Divine Comedy; while Ferdinand Brunetire, the famous French literary critic, suggests that it may stem from poems by Alfred de Musset or Alfred de Vigny.While Balzac sought the comprehensive scope of Dante, his title indicates the worldly, human concerns of a realist novelist. The stories are placed in a variety of settings, with characters reappearing in multiple stories. The Comdie humaine frequently portrays the complex emotional, social and financial relationships between fathers and their children, and between fatherfigures and their mentors, and these relationships are metaphorically linked as well with issues of nationhood (the king as father, regicide), nobility (bloodlines, family names), history (parental secrets), wealth (the origin of parental fortunes, dowries) and artistic creation (the writer or artist as father of the work of art). Father Goriot is perhaps the most famous and most tragic of these father figures, but in Le Pre Goriot, Eugne de Rastignac also encounters two other paternal figures, Vautrin and Taillefer, whose aspirations and methods define different paternal paths. Other significant fathers in the series include Eugnie Grandet's abusive and money-hoarding father and Csar Birotteau, the doomed capitalist.

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Origins of the French Enlightenment

Although the first major figures of the Enlightenment came from England, the movement truly exploded in France, which became a hotbed of political and intellectual thought in the 1700s. The roots of this French Enlightenment lay largely in resentment and discontent over the decadence of the French monarchy in the late 1600s. During the reign of the wildly extravagant Sun King Louis XIV (reigned 16431715), wealthy intellectual elites began to gather regularly in Parisian salons (often hosted by high-society women) and complain about the state of their country. The salons only grew in popularity when Louis XIV died and the far less competent Louis XV took over. Gradually, complaints in the salons and coffee shops changed from idle whining into constructive political thought. Especially after the works of John Locke became widespread, participants at the salons began to discuss substantive political and social philosophies of the day. Before long, cutting-edge thought in a variety of disciplines worked its way into the salons, and the French Enlightenment was born. The Philosophes By the early 1700s, coffee shops, salons, and other social groups were popping up all over Paris, encouraging intellectual discussion regarding the political and philosophical status of the country. Moreover, members of these groups increasingly clamored to read the latest work of leading philosophers. These nontraditional thinkers came to be known as the philosophes, a group that championed personal liberties and the work of Locke and Newton, denounced Christianity, and actively opposed the abusive governments found throughout Europe at the time. As varied as they were, the leading French philosophes generally came from similar schools of thought. They were predominantly writers, journalists, and teachers and were confident that human society could be improved through rational thought.

Philosophes and the Church

A large part of the philosophes attacks were focused on the Church and its traditions. In matters of faith, many of the prominent philosophes weredeists they belie100ved in an all-powerful being but likened him to a cosmic watchmaker who simply set the universe in autonomous motion and never again tampered with it. Moreover, they disdained organized religion and the Churchs traditional idea of the chain of being, which implied a natural hierarchy of existenceGod first, then angels, monarchs, aristocrats, and so on. The philosophes also raised objections against the decadent lifestyles of leading Church representatives, as well as the Churchs persistence in collecting exorbitant taxes and tithes from the commoners to fund outlandish salaries for bishops and other Church officials.
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What the philosophes found most appalling, however, was the control that the Church held over impressionable commoners by instilling in them a fear of eternal damnation. The philosophes may have had mixed feelings about the common people, but they had very strong feelings against the Church. As a result, they provoked the Church by challenging doctrines such as the existence of miracles and divine revelation, often disproving specific tenets with simple science. The Church, in turn, hated the philosophes and all they stood for.

Literacy
Complementing and enabling the socially and politically active atmosphere was the dramatically improving literacy rate in France. Beyond just talking about revolutionary ideas, more and more French people, especially in Paris and its surrounds, were reading and writing about them as well. A symbiotic relationship developed as readers anxiously awaited more literature from the philosophes, and in turn the response that the writers received compelled them to write more. The scholarly atmosphere at the time also providedwomen of French societyalbeit still within traditional roles as salon hostesseswith an opportunity to contribute to the conversation.

Voltaire
The primary satirist of the Enlightenment, Franois-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire (16941778), entered the literary world as a playwright. He quickly became renowned for his wit and satire, as well as the libel claims that often resulted. In and out of prison and other various predicaments for most of his young life, Voltaire spent a period of exile in England during which he was introduced to the works of Locke and Newton. The two thinkers had a profound impact on the young Voltaire, who became wildly prolific in the years that followed, authoring more than sixty plays and novels and countless other letters and poems.Voltaire was an avowed deist, believing in God but hating organized religion. As a result, he made Christianitywhich he called glorified superstitiona frequent target of his wit. Voltaire was also an ardent supporter of monarchy and spent a considerable amount of time working toward judicial reform. Later, after bouncing around to various countries and working with a number of notable contemporaries, Voltaire wrote the satire Candide (1759), which has since earned distinction as one of the most influential literary works in history. Although Voltaire lacked the practical breadth of some of his contemporarieshe did not dabble in multiple scientific fieldshe made up for it with the volume of his work. Using his brilliant, sarcastic wit to analyze everything from philosophy to politics to law, he extolled the virtue of reason over superstition and intolerance and effectively became the voice of the Enlightenment. Moreover, his satirical
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style enabled him to make incredibly pointed criticisms while generally avoiding serious prosecution by those he attacked. Although detractors complain that Voltaire never offered any solutions to the problems he criticized, he never aspired to do so.

Diderot
The third major figure of the French Enlightenment was Denis Diderot(1713 1784), a writer and philosopher best known for editing and assembling the massive Encyclopdie , an attempt to collect virtually all of human knowledge gathered in various fields up to that point. Twenty-eight volumes in length seventeen text, eleven illustratedthe portion of theEncyclopdie edited by Diderot was published one volume at a time from1751 to 1772. Diderot, assisted by French mathematician Jean Le Rond dAlembert for part of the project, painstakingly collected as much Enlightenment-era knowledge as he possibly could. After Diderots involvement, an additional seven volumes were completed, but Diderot himself did not edit them. Beyond just facts, definitions, and explanations, the Encyclopdie also included space for philosophes to discuss their thoughts on various topicsalthough even these opinions were filtered through the lens of scientific breakdown. A veritable whos-who of Enlightenment-era scholars contributed to the collection, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau (seeRousseau, p. 29 ). Due to the highly scientificand thus untraditionalnature of the Encyclopdie, it met with a significant amount of scorn. Diderot was widely accused of plagiarism and inaccuracy, and many considered the collection to be an overt attack on the monarchy and the Church. The Encyclopdie was one of the primary vehicles by which the ideas of the Enlightenment spread across the European continent, as it was the first work to collect all of the myriad knowledge and developments that the Enlightenment had fostered. However, the Encyclopdie succeeded not because it explicitly attempted to persuade people to subscribe to Enlightenment ideas. Rather, it simply attempted to present all of the accumulated knowledge of the Western world in one place and let readers draw their own conclusions. Not surprisingly, the power establishment in Europe frowned on the idea of people drawing their own conclusions; the Church and monarchy hated the Encyclopdie, as it implied that many of their teachings and doctrines were fraudulent. In response to attempted bans, Diderot printed additional copies in secrecy and snuck them out.

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Zadig ou la Destine ("Zadig, or The Book of Fate") (1747) is a famous novel and work of philosophical fiction written by Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. It tells the story of Zadig, a philosopher in ancient Babylonia. The author does not attempt any historical accuracy, and some of the problems Zadig faces are thinly disguised references to social and political problems of Voltaire's own day. The book is philosophical in nature, and presents human life as in the hands of a destinybeyond human control. It is a story of religious and metaphysical orthodoxy, both of which Voltaire challenges with his presentation of the moral revolution taking place in Zadig himself. Voltaire's skillful use of the literary devices of contradiction and juxtaposition are shown in beautiful form in this prose. It is one of his most celebrated works after Candide.

Naturalism Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of literary realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19thcentury France and elsewhere. Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.[1] They believed that one's heredity and social environment largely determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g. the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, mile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery.

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Defining characteristics There are defining characteristics of literary naturalism. One of these is pessimism. Very often, one or more characters will continue to repeat one line or phrase that tends to have a pessimistic connotation, sometimes emphasizing the inevitability of death. [...] an old crone of fifty years, a long emaciated, bleating at the moon, depicted on her skinny shins [...] puncturing the sheets by her sharp bones (very rough translation in need of verification) Another characteristic of literary naturalism is detachment from the story. The author often tries to maintain a tone that will be experienced as 'objective.' Also, an author will sometimes achieve detachment by creating nameless characters (though, strictly speaking, this is more common among modernists such as Ernest Hemingway). This puts the focus on the plot and what happens to the character, rather than the characters themselves. Another characteristic of naturalism is determinism. Determinism is basically the opposite of the notion of free will. For determinism, the idea that individual characters have a direct influence on the course of their lives is supplanted by a focus on nature or fate. Often, a naturalist author will lead the reader to believe a character's fate has been pre-determined, usually by environmental factors, and that he/she can do nothing about it. Another common characteristic is a surprising twist at the end of the story. Equally, there tends to be in naturalist novels and stories a strong sense that nature is indifferent to human struggle. These are only a few of the defining characteristics of naturalism, however. Naturalism is an extension of realism, and may be better understood by study of the basic precepts of that literary movement. The term naturalism itself may have been used in this sense for the first time by mile Zola. It is believed that he sought a new idea to convince the reading public of something new and more modern in his fiction. He argued that his innovation in fiction-writing was the creation of characters and plots based on the scientific method.

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Symbolism
Symbolism in Literature Symbolism in literature is one of the many tools that writers employ in order to generate not only interest in one's work but also to create another level of meaning. If you are interested in learning about the importance of symbolism, then this article will help you understand the concept. "Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration; it is inherent in the very texture of human life. Language itself is a symbolism." According to etymology, symbol literally means something that has been put together. The source of the word is the Greek word sumballein, that refers to the idea of putting things together to contrast them and ultimately became a word that was used for compare. From the word symbol came the concept of symbolism where one object is used to refer to something else. So, when an author or a poet uses one object to refer to a completely different idea, then he or she is employing symbolism. So why do writers use symbols in literature? What is the importance of symbolism? Symbolism is used in literature to give to the literary work meaning that goes beyond what is evident to the reader. Symbolism helps in giving the piece of writing feeling and mood without the writer having to actually spell out the same. By giving certain things human like characteristics and also defining them with certain qualities, the writer can manage to give the novel another level that may refer to things that are completely alien from what is mentioned in the piece of writing.

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Examples of Symbolism in Literature Symbolism need not necessarily have to be symbols that are easily recognizable or ones that are commonly used. They can be subtle symbolic representations used to hint at something without making it an obvious and overwhelming statement. There are many famous examples of symbolism in novels in English language, some of which are listed out below.

The Scarlet Letter: The forcible wearing of the letter 'A' by Hester Prynne to indicate that she was an adulteress and that the name of the father of her illegitimate child started with the letter A. The Lord of the Flies: This book was replete with symbolisms. The island was symbolic of our world and the way the characters dealt with the various situations was a symbol for the way many people live their lives. Every character symbolizes something, for example, Ralph is a symbol of good intentions, Piggy symbolizes intelligence and civilization, the conch stands for democracy, Jack embodies the worst characteristics of the human race, etc. In fact several believe that William Golding meant the title too to be a reference toBeelzebub, a Hebrew name that is sometimes used to refer to Satan. MacBeth: William Shakespeare was a master of symbology. In this play, he uses blood to symbolize guilt and a raven to symbolize bad luck. Pilgrim's Progress: John Bunyan very obviously used his protagonist to be the embodiment of every Christian. Every fellow traveler of Christian represents states of being, every place he passes represents the temptations that you may face in life before being led to your ultimate destination, Heaven which in the book is Celestial City.

This is a very small list of the many famous novels that have examples of symbolism in them. Harry Potter is a great way to introduce symbolism to kids. The entire series uses several mythical creatures and many common place symbols to explain events. The use of the serpent as the symbol for the house of Slytherin is a clear indication of the evil that it stands for. Symbolism is also a key part of poetry with many poets using symbols to express emotions like love, grief, death, anger, jealousy, etc. Understanding symbolism can be difficult because while some writers use very simple imagery to put forward their views, there are authors, playwrights and poets who believe in using multiple symbols and several contexts to play on the symbols they have used. Symbolism is what makes prose and poetry more enchanting to read. It gives us a reason to find insights into the writer's way of thinking and to try to understand why a writer would put forward a theory the way he or she has. It is the writer's way of playing games with the reader.
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20th century literature

Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century. The range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written from (roughly) 1900 through the 1990s. In terms of the Euro-American tradition, the main periods are captured in the bipartite division, Modernist literature and Postmodern literature, flowering from roughly 1900 to 1940 and 1960 to 1990[1] respectively, divided, as a rule of thumb, by World War II. The somewhat malleable term of contemporary literature is usually applied with a post-1960 cutoff point. Although these terms (modern, contemporary and postmodern) are most applicable to Western literary history, the rise of globalization has allowed European literary ideas to spread into non-Western cultures fairly rapidly, so that Asian and African literatures can be included into these divisions with only minor qualifications. And in some ways, such as in Postcolonial literature, writers from non-Western cultures were on the forefront of literary development. Technological advances during the 20th century allowed cheaper production of books, resulting in a significant rise in production of popular literature and trivial literature, comparable to the development in music. The division of "popular literature" and "high literature" in the 20th century is by no means absolute, and various genres such as detectives or science fiction fluctuate between the two. For the most part of the century mostly ignored by mainstream literary criticism, these genres develop their own establishments and critical awards, such as the Nebula Award (since 1965), the British Fantasy Award (since 1971) or the Mythopoeic Awards (since 1971). Towards the end of the 20th century, electronic literature develops as a genre due to the development of hypertext and later the world wide web. The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually throughout the century (with the exception of 1914, 1918, 1935 and 19401943), the first laureate (1901) being Sully Prudhomme. The New York Times Best Seller list has been published since 1942. The best-selling works of the 20th century are estimated to be Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966, 900 million copies), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997, 120 million copies), And Then There Were None (1939, 115 million copies) and The Lord of the Rings (1954/55, 100 million copies). The Lord of the Rings was also voted "book of the century" in various surveys.[2][3][4][5] Perry Rhodan (1961 to present) boasts as being the best-selling book series, with an estimated total of 1 billion copies sold.
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Literary Movements and Periods

Literature constantly evolves as new movements emerge to speak to the concerns of different groups of people and historical periods. Absurd, literature of the (c. 19301970): A movement, primarily in the theater, that responded to the seeming illogicality and purposelessness of human life in works marked by a lack of clear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis. Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot is one of the most celebrated works in the theater of the absurd. Aestheticism (c. 18351910): A late-19th-century movement that believed in art as an end in itself. Aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater rejected the view that art had to posses a higher moral or political value and believed instead in art for arts sake. Angry Young Men (1950s1980s): A group of male British writers who created visceral plays and fiction at odds with the political establishment and a self-satisfied middle class. John Osbornes play Look Back in Anger (1957) is one of the seminal works of this movement. Beat Generation (1950s1960s): A group of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s who sought release and illumination though a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac (On The Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) gained fame by giving readings in coffeehouses, often accompanied by jazz music. Bloomsbury Group (c. 19061930s): An informal group of friends and lovers, including Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes, who lived in the Bloomsbury section of London in the early 20th century and who had a considerable liberalizing influence on British culture. Commedia dellarte (1500s1700s): Improvisational comedy first developed in Renaissance Italy that involved stock characters and centered around a set scenario. The elements of farce and buffoonery in commedia dellarte, as well as its standard characters and plot intrigues, have had a tremendous influence on Western comedy, and can still be seen in contemporary drama and television sitcoms. Dadaism (19161922): An avant-garde movement that began in response to the devastation of World War I. Based in Paris and led by the poet Tristan Tzara, the Dadaists produced nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry, and art, and rejected the traditions, rules, and ideals of prewar Europe. Enlightenment (c. 16601790): An intellectual movement in France and other parts of Europe that emphasized the importance of reason, progress, and liberty. The Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason, is primarily associated with nonfiction writing, such as essays and philosophical treatises. Major Enlightenment writers include Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ren Descartes.
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Elizabethan era (c. 15581603): A flourishing period in English literature, particularly drama, that coincided with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and included writers such as Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser. Gothic fiction (c. 17641820): A genre of late-18th-century literature that featured brooding, mysterious settings and plots and set the stage for what we now call horror stories. Horace Walpoles Castle of Otranto, set inside a medieval castle, was the first major Gothic novel. Later, the term Gothic grew to include any work that attempted to create an atmosphere of terror or the unknown, such as Edgar Allan Poes short stories. Harlem Renaissance (c. 19181930): A flowering of African-American literature, art, and music during the 1920s in New York City. W. E. B. DuBoiss The Souls of Black Folk anticipated the movement, which included Alain Lockes anthology The New Negro, Zora Neale Hurstons novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Lost Generation (c. 19181930s): A term used to describe the generation of writers, many of them soldiers that came to maturity during World War I. Notable members of this group include F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Sun Also Rises embodies the Lost Generations sense of disillusionment. Magic realism (c. 1935present): A style of writing, popularized by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Gnter Grass, and others, that combines realism with moments of dream-like fantasy within a single prose narrative. Metaphysical poets (c. 16331680): A group of 17th-century poets who combined direct language with ingenious images, paradoxes, and conceits. John Donne and Andrew Marvell are the best known poets of this school. Middle English (c. 10661500): The transitional period between AngloSaxon and modern English. The cultural upheaval that followed the Norman Conquest of England, in 1066, saw a flowering of secular literature, including ballads, chivalric romances, allegorical poems, and a variety of religious plays. Chaucers The Canterbury Tales is the most celebrated work of this period. Modernism (1890s1940s): A literary and artistic movement that provided a radical breaks with traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social conventions, and morality. Major themes of this period include the attack on notions of hierarchy; experimentation in new forms of narrative, such as stream of consciousness; doubt about the existence of knowable, objective reality; attention to alternative viewpoints and modes of thinking; and self-referentiality as a means of drawing attention to the relationships between artist and audience, and form and content.
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High modernism (1920s): Generally considered the golden age of modernist literature, this period saw the publication of James JoycesUlysses, T. S. Eliots The Waste Land, Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, and Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time. Naturalism (c. 18651900): A literary movement that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Leading writers in the movement include mile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. Neoclassicism (c. 16601798): A literary movement, inspired by the rediscovery of classical works of ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized balance, restraint, and order. Neoclassicism roughly coincided with the Enlightenment, which espoused reason over passion. Notable neoclassical writers include Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Nouveau Roman (New Novel) (c. 19551970): A French movement, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet, that dispensed with traditional elements of the novel, such as plot and character, in favor of neutrally recording the experience of sensations and things. Postcolonial literature (c. 1950spresent): Literature by and about people from former European colonies, primarily in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. This literature aims both to expand the traditional canon of Western literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about literature, especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity, and race. Prominent postcolonial works include Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart, V. S. Naipauls A House for Mr. Biswas, and Salman Rushdies Midnights Children. Edward SaidsOrientalism (1978) provided an important theoretical basis for understanding postcolonial literature. Postmodernism (c. 1945present): A notoriously ambiguous term, especially as it refers to literature, postmodernism can be seen as a response to the elitism of high modernism as well as to the horrors of World War II. Postmodern literature is characterized by a disjointed, fragmented pastiche of high and low culture that reflects the absence of tradition and structure in a world driven by technology and consumerism. Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, and Kurt Vonnegut are among many who are considered postmodern authors. Pre-Raphaelites (c. 18481870): The literary arm of an artistic movement that drew inspiration from Italian artists working before Raphael (1483 1520). The Pre-Raphaelites combined sensuousness and religiosity through archaic poetic forms and medieval settings. William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Swinburne were leading poets in the movement.
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Realism (c. 18301900): A loose term that can refer to any work that aims at honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, or melodrama. Technically, realism refers to a late-19th-century literary movement primarily French, English, and Americanthat aimed at accurate detailed portrayal of ordinary, contemporary life. Many of the 19th centurys greatest novelists, such as Honor de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy, are classified as realists. Naturalism ( see above ) can be seen as an intensification of realism. Romanticism (c. 17981832): A literary and artistic movement that reacted against the restraint and universalism of the Enlightenment. The Romantics celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and the purity of nature. Notable English Romantic writers include Jane Austen, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. Prominent figures in the American Romantic movement include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Sturm und Drang (1770s): German for storm and stress, this brief German literary movement advocated passionate individuality in the face of Neoclassical rationalism and restraint. Goethes The Sorrows of Young Werther is the most enduring work of this movement, which greatly influenced the Romantic movement (see above). Surrealism (1920s1930s): An avant-garde movement, based primarily in France, that sought to break down the boundaries between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, through a variety of literary and artistic experiments. The surrealist poets, such as Andr Breton and Paul Eluard, were not as successful as their artist counterparts, who included Salvador Dal, Joan Mir, and Ren Magritte. Symbolists (1870s1890s): A group of French poets who reacted against realism with a poetry of suggestion based on private symbols, and experimented with new poetic forms such as free verse and the prose poem. The symbolistsStphane Mallarm, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine are the most well knownwere influenced by Charles Baudelaire. In turn, they had a seminal influence on the modernist poetry of the early 20th century. Transcendentalism (c. 18351860): An American philosophical and spiritual movement, based in New England, that focused on the primacy of the individual conscience and rejected materialism in favor of closer communion with nature. Ralph Waldo Emersons Self-Reliance and Henry David Thoreaus Walden are famous transcendentalist works.

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Victorian era (c. 18321901): The period of English history between the passage of the first Reform Bill (1832) and the death of Queen Victoria (reigned 18371901). Though remembered for strict social, political, and sexual conservatism and frequent clashes between religion and science, the period also saw prolific literary activity and significant social reform and criticism. Notable Victorian novelists include the Bront sisters, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy, while prominent poets include Matthew Arnold; Robert Browning; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Christina Rossetti. Notable Victorian nonfiction writers include Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Charles Darwin, who penned the famous On the Origin of Species (1859).

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The Metamorphosis
Full title The Metamorphosis Author Franz Kafka Type of work Short story/novella Genre Absurdism Language German Time and place written Prague, 1912 Date of first publication 1915 Publisher Kurt Wolff Verlag Narrator The narrator is an anonymous figure who recounts the events of the story in a flat, neutral tone. Point of view The narrator speaks exclusively in the third person, focusing primarily on the thoughts, feelings, and actions of Gregor Samsa. The narrator only describes events that Gregor sees, hears, remembers, or imagines from the actions around him. Tone The narrators tone is flat and unchanging, describing even the most outlandish events in a neutral fashion. Tense Past tense Setting (time) Unspecified, though references to trains and streetcars suggest the late-nineteenth century or early twentieth century Setting (place) The Samsa familys apartment in an unspecified city Protagonist Gregor Samsa Major conflict Gregor Samsa struggles to reconcile his humanity with his transformation into a giant bug Rising action When Gregor Samsa wakes up inexplicably transformed into a giant bug, he must handle the consequences in terms of his understanding of himself and his relationship with his family

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Climax Unable to bear the thought that all evidence of his human life will be removed from his room, he clings to the picture of the woman in furs, startling Grete and the mother and leading the father to attack him Falling action Gregor, injured in the fathers attack, slowly weakens, venturing out of his room once more to hear Grete play the violin and dying shortly thereafter Themes The absurdity of life; the disconnect between mind and body; the limits of sympathy; alienation Motifs Metamorphosis; sleep and rest; money Symbols The picture of the woman in furs; the fathers uniform; food Foreshadowing Gregor is seriously injured after he leaves the room a second time and he stops eating and sleeping, foreshadowing his eventual death; the family gradually takes less interest in Gregor, foreshadowing their decision to get rid of him

Plot
Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up in his bed to find himself transformed into a large insect. He looks around his room, which appears normal, and decides to go back to sleep to forget about what has happened. He attempts to roll over, only to discover that he cannot due to his new bodyhe is stuck on his hard, convex back. He tries to scratch an itch on his stomach, but when he touches himself with one of his many new legs, he is disgusted. He reflects on how dreary life as a traveling salesman is and how he would quit if his parents and sister did not depend so much on his income. He turns to the clock and sees that he has overslept and missed his train to work. Gregors mother knocks on the door, and when he answers her, Gregor finds that his voice has changed. His family suspects that he may be ill, so they ask him to open the door, which he keeps locked out of habit. He tries to get out of bed, but he cannot maneuver his transformed body. While struggling to move, he hears his office manager come into the familys apartment to find out why Gregor has not shown up to work. He eventually rocks himself to the floor and calls out that he will open the door momentarily. Through the door, the office manager warns Gregor of the consequences of missing work and hints that Gregors recent work has not been satisfactory. Gregor protests and tells the office manager that he will be there shortly. Neither his family nor the office manager can understand what Gregor says, and they suspect that something may be seriously wrong with him. Gregor manages to unlock and open the door with his mouth, since he has no hands. He begs the office managers
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forgiveness for his late start. Horrified by Gregors appearance, the office manager bolts from the apartment. Gregor tries to catch up with the fleeing office manager, but his father drives him back into the bedroom with a cane and a rolled newspaper. Gregor injures himself squeezing back through the doorway, and his father slams the door shut. Gregor, exhausted, falls asleep. Gregor wakes and sees that someone has put milk and bread in his room. Initially excited, he quickly discovers that he has no taste for milk, once one of his favorite foods. He settles himself under a couch and listens to the quiet apartment. The next morning, his sister Grete comes in, sees that he has not touched the milk, and replaces it with rotting food scraps, which Gregor happily eats. This begins a routine in which his sister feeds him and cleans up while he hides under the couch, afraid that his appearance will frighten her. Gregor spends his time listening through the wall to his family members talking. They often discuss the difficult financial situation they find themselves in now that Gregor cant provide for them. Gregor also learns that his mother wants to visit him, but his sister and father will not let her. Gregor grows more comfortable with his changed body. He begins climbing the walls and ceiling for amusement. Discovering Gregors new pastime, Grete decides to remove some of the furniture to give Gregor more space. She and her mother begin taking furniture away, but Gregor finds their actions deeply distressing. He tries to save a picture on the wall of a woman wearing a fur hat, fur scarf, and a fur muff. Gregors mother sees him hanging on the wall and passes out. Grete calls out to Gregorthe first time anyone has spoken directly to him since his transformation. Gregor runs out of the room and into the kitchen. His father returns from his new job, and misunderstanding the situation, believes Gregor has tried to attack the mother. The father throws apples at Gregor, and one sinks into his back and remains lodged there. Gregor manages to get back into his bedroom but is severely injured. Gregors family begins leaving the bedroom door open for a few hours each evening so he can watch them. He sees his family wearing down as a result of his transformation and their new poverty. Even Grete seems to resent Gregor now, feeding him and cleaning up with a minimum of effort. The family replaces their maid with a cheap cleaning lady who tolerates Gregors appearance and speaks to him occasionally. They also take on three boarders, requiring them to move excess furniture into Gregors room, which distresses Gregor. Gregor has also lost his taste for the food Grete brings and he almost entirely ceases eating. One evening, the cleaning lady leaves Gregors door open while the boarders lounge about the living room. Grete has been asked to play the violin for them, and Gregor creeps out of his bedroom to listen. The boarders, who initially seemed interested in Grete, grow bored with her performance, but Gregor is transfixed by it. One of the boarders spots Gregor and they become alarmed.
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Gregors father tries to shove the boarders back into their rooms, but the three men protest and announce that they will move out immediately without paying rent because of the disgusting conditions in the apartment. Grete tells her parents that they must get rid of Gregor or they will all be ruined. Her father agrees, wishing Gregor could understand them and would leave of his own accord. Gregor does in fact understand and slowly moves back to the bedroom. There, determined to rid his family of his presence, Gregor dies. Upon discovering that Gregor is dead, the family feels a great sense of relief. The father kicks out the boarders and decides to fire the cleaning lady, who has disposed of Gregors body. The family takes a trolley ride out to the countryside, during which they consider their finances. Months of spare living as a result of Gregors condition have left them with substantial savings. They decide to move to a better apartment. Grete appears to have her strength and beauty back, which leads her parents to think about finding her a husband. Gregor Samsa Despite his complete physical transformation into an insect at the beginning of the story, Gregor changes very little as a character over the course of The Metamorphosis. Most notably, both as a man and as an insect Gregor patiently accepts the hardships he faces without complaint. When his fathers business failed, he readily accepted his new role as the money-earner in the family without question, even though it meant taking a job he disliked as a traveling salesman. Similarly, when he first realizes he has transformed into an insect, he does not bemoan his condition, wonder about its cause, or attempt to rectify it in any way. On the contrary, he quickly accepts that he has become a bug and tries to go about his life as best he can in his new condition. The narration in the story mirrors Gregors calm forbearance by never questioning or explaining how or why this odd transformation occurred or remarking on its strangeness. Instead, the story, much like Gregor, moves on quickly from the metamorphosis itself and focuses on the consequences of Gregors change. For Gregor, that primarily means becoming accustomed to his new body. In fact reconciling his human thoughts and feelings with his new, insect body is the chief conflict Gregor faces in the story. Despite having changed into an insect, Gregor initially still wants to go to work so that he can provide for his family. It takes him time to realize that he can no longer play that role in his family and that he cant even go outside in his current state. As the story continues, Gregors insect body has an increasing influence on his psychology. He finds that he is at ease hiding in the dark under the sofa in his room, like a bug would, even though his body wont fit comfortably. He also discovers that he enjoys crawling on the walls and ceiling. But Gregors humanity never disappears entirely. He still feels human emotions and has strong memories of his human life.
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As a result, even though he knows he would feel more physically comfortable if his room were emptied of furniture, allowing him to crawl anywhere he pleased, Gregor panics when Grete and his mother are taking out the furniture, such as the writing desk he remembers doing all his assignments at as a boy. In a desperate attempt to hold onto the few reminders he has of his humanity, he clings to the picture of the woman muffled in fur so that no one will take it away. Ultimately hes unable to fully adapt to his new body or to find a new role within his family, which is disgusted by him and ashamed of his presence in the house. Toward the end of the story, he even feels haunted by the thought that he might be able to take control of the familys affairs again and resume his role as the familys moneyearner. Despite these hopes, he decides it would be best for the family if he were to disappear entirely, and so he dies much as he lived: accepting his fate without complaint and thinking of his familys best interests.

Grete Samsa
Apart from her brother Gregor, Grete is the only other character addressed by name in the story, a distinction that reflects her relative importance. Grete is also the only character to show pity for Gregor through most of the novella (his mother also exhibits pity for him later in the story), apparently owing to the great affection Grete and Gregor had for each other before Gregors transformation. Consequently, she becomes Gregors primary caretaker. She brings him food, cleans his room, places his chair by the window so he can see out to the street, and comes up with the idea of removing his furniture so he has more room to scurry and climb. In this role as caretaker she serves as Gregors only real human contact for most of the story, and she acts as Gregors only strong emotional tie to his familyand indeed to the rest of humanity. Grete, however, changes more than any other character in the storyin essence undergoing her own metamorphosis from a girl into a womanand that change occurs while her pity for Gregor slowly diminishes. While at first Grete takes care of her brother out of kindness, eventually she comes to regard the job as a duty. She doesnt always enjoy it, but it serves to define her position in the family, and she becomes territorial about caring for Gregor, not wanting her mother to be involved. As she matures and takes on more adult responsibilities, most notably getting a job to help provide for her family financially, her commitment to Gregor diminishes. Eventually she comes to resent the role, and it is Grete who decides they must get rid of Gregor. The story ends with the parents recognizing that Grete has become a pretty young woman and thinking that it may be time to find her a husband, suggesting Grete has completed her own transformation into an adult.

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The father
The reader predominantly sees Gregors father from Gregors point of view in the story, and for the most part, he appears as a hopeless and unkind man, concerned primarily with money, who isnt particularly close to his son. We learn, for example, that he had a business that failed, and since its failure he has lost his motivation and essentially given up working, forcing Gregor to provide for the family and work to pay off the fathers debts. Yet despite Gregors help, the father has no sympathy for Gregor after Gregor undergoes his metamorphosis. On the day of Gregors change, the father only seems concerned about the familys finances, and in the two instances when he interacts directly with Gregor in the story, he attacks Gregor in some way, first when he beats Gregor back into his room at the beginning and later when he throws the fruit at him. These details suggest an estrangement between Gregor and his father (Kafkas strained relationship with his own father, whom he viewed as alien and overbearing, certainly gives weight to such an interpretation). Gregor never explicitly says he resents his father, but its clear that he only works as a traveling salesman to make up for his fathers failure in business, suggesting he feels trapped by his fathers failings. Moreover, Gregor never displays the same affection for his father that he displays, albeit rarely, toward his mother and sister, as when he longs to see his mother before she and Grete begin moving the furniture out of his room. Adding to this sense of estrangement is the way the father is referred to in the story. The narrator does not name him beyond calling him Mr. Samsa, and in Gregors thoughts he almost always appears as the father.

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Themes
The Absurdity of Life Beginning with its first sentence, The Metamorphosis deals with an absurd, or wildly irrational, event, which in itself suggests that the story operates in a random, chaotic universe. The absurd event is Gregors waking up to discover he has turned into a giant insect, and since its so far beyond the boundaries of a natural occurrenceits not just unlikely to happen, its physically impossibleGregors metamorphosis takes on a supernatural significance. Also notable is the fact that the story never explains Gregors transformation. It never implies, for instance, that Gregors change is the result of any particular cause, such as punishment for some misbehavior. On the contrary, by all evidence Gregor has been a good son and brother, taking a job he dislikes so that he can provide for them and planning to pay for his sister to study music at the conservatory. There is no indication that Gregor deserves his fate. Rather, the story and all the members of the Samsa family treat the event as a random occurrence, like catching an illness. All these elements together give the story a distinct overtone of absurdity and suggest a universe that functions without any governing system of order and justice. The responses of the various characters add to this sense of absurdity, specifically because they seem almost as absurd as Gregors transformation itself. The characters are unusually calm and unquestioning, and most dont act particularly surprised by the event. (The notable exception is the Samsas first maid, who begs to be fired.) Even Gregor panics only at the thought of getting in trouble at work, not at the realization that he is physically altered, and he makes no efforts to determine what caused the change or how to fix it. He worries instead about commonplace problems, like what makes him feel physically comfortable. In fact, the other characters in the story generally treat the metamorphosis as something unusual and disgusting, but not exceptionally horrifying or impossible, and they mostly focusing on adapting to it rather than fleeing from Gregor or trying to cure him. Gregors family, for example, doesnt seek out any help or advice, and they appear to feel more ashamed and disgusted than shocked. Their second maid also shows no surprise when she discovers Gregor, and when the boarders staying with the family see Gregor they are mostly upset that Gregor is unclean and disturbs the sense of order they desire in the house. These unusual reactions contribute to the absurdity of the story, but they also imply that the characters to some degree expect, or at least are not surprised by, absurdity in their world.

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The Disconnect Between Mind and Body

Gregors transformation completely alters his outward appearance, but it leaves his mind unchanged, creating a discord, or lack of harmony, between his mind and body. When he first gets out of his bed after waking, for instance, he tries to stand upright, even though his body is not suited to being upright. He also thinks of going to work, despite the fact that he cant by any means do so, and when Grete leaves him the milk at the beginning of Part 2, he is surprised to find he doesnt like it, even though milk was a favorite drink when he was human. In essence, he continues to think with a human mind, but because his body is no longer human, he is unable at first to reconcile these two parts of himself. As Gregor becomes accustomed to his new body, his mind begins to change in accordance with his physical needs and desires. Yet hes never able to fully bring his mind and body into harmony. Gregor gradually behaves more and more like an insect, not only craving different foods than he did when he was human, but also beginning to prefer tight, dark spaces, like the area under his sofa, and enjoying crawling on the walls and ceiling. (Through these details, the story suggests that our physical lives shape and direct our mental lives, not the other way around.) But Gregors humanity never disappears entirely, and he feels conflicted as a result. This conflict reaches its climax when Grete and the mother move the furniture out of Gregors room. Gregor initially approves of the idea because it will make his room more comfortable for him physically. Without furniture, hell be able to crawl anywhere he pleases. But realizing that his possessions, which represent to him his former life as a human, provide him emotional comfort, he suddenly faces a choice: he can be physically comfortable or emotionally comfortable, but not both. In other words, his mind and body remain opposed to one another. Gregor, unable to relinquish his humanity, chooses emotional comfort, leading him to desperately cling to the picture of the woman in furs. The Limits of Sympathy After Gregors metamorphosis, his family members struggle with feelings of both sympathy and revulsion toward him. Grete and the mother in particular feel a great deal of sympathy for Gregor after his change, apparently because they suspect some aspect of his humanity remains despite his appearance. This sympathy leads Grete initially to take on the role of Gregors caretakershe even goes so far as to try to discover what food he likes after his changeand it leads the mother to fight with Grete over moving the furniture out of Gregors room since she holds out hope that he will return to his human form. Even the father, who shows the least sympathy of the family members toward Gregor and even attacks him twice, never suggests that they kill him or force him out of the house. Instead, he implicitly shows compassion for Gregor by allowing the family to care for him.
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Eventually, however, the stresses caused by Gregors presence wear down the family members sympathy, and even the most caring of them find that their sympathy has a limit. One of those sources of stress is Gregors appearance. Grete is so upset and revolted by the way he looks that she can hardly stand to be in the room with him, and his mother is so horrified when she sees him as she and Grete are moving his furniture that she faints. In addition, Gregors presence is never forgotten in the house, causing the family members to feel constantly uncomfortable and leading them to speak to each other mostly in whispers. Moreover, the fact that Gregor cannot communicate his thoughts and feelings to them leaves them without any connection to his human side, and consequently, they come to see him more and more as an actual insect. All these factors combined steadily work against their sympathy, and the family reaches a point where Gregors presence is too much to bear. Significantly, it is Grete, the character to show the most sympathy toward Gregor, who decides they must get rid of him.

Alienation
Perhaps the greatest consequence of Gregors metamorphosis is the psychological distance it creates between Gregor and those around him. Gregors change makes him literally and emotionally separate from his family membersindeed, from humanity in generaland he even refers to it as his imprisonment. After his transformation he stays almost exclusively in his room with his door closed and has almost no contact with other people. At most, Grete spends a few minutes in the room with him, and during this time Gregor always hides under the couch and has no interaction with her. Furthermore, he is unable to speak, and consequently he has no way of communicating with other people. Lastly, Gregors metamorphosis literally separates him from the human race as it makes him no longer human. Essentially he has become totally isolated from everyone around him, including those people he cares for like Grete and his mother. But as we learn over the course of the story, this feeling of estrangement actually preceded his transformation. Shortly after waking and discovering that he has become a bug, for example, Gregor reflects on his life as a traveling salesman, noting how superficial and transitory his relationships have become as a result of his constant traveling. Later, Gregor recalls how his initial pride at being able to support his family faded once his parents began to expect that support, and how he felt emotionally distant from them as a result. There is also no mention in the story of any close friends or intimate relationships outside his family. In fact, the alienation caused by Gregors metamorphosis can be viewed as an extension of the alienation he already felt as a person.

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Motifs Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis depicts multiple transformations, with the most significant and obvious example being Gregors metamorphosis into an insect. Though Gregors physical change is complete when the story begins, he also undergoes a related change, a psychological transformation as he adapts to his new body. Grete experiences her own transformation in the story as she develops from a child into an adult. (In fact, in zoology the word metamorphosis refers to a stage in insect and amphibian development during which an immature form of the animal undergoes a physical transformation to become an adult.) At the beginning of the work, she is essentially still a girl, but as she begins to take on adult duties, such as caring for Gregor and then getting a job to help support her family, she steadily matures. In the storys closing scene, her parents realize she has grown into a pretty young woman and think of finding her a husband. The scene signals that she is now an adult emotionally and also physically, as it describes the change her body has undergone and echoes Gregors own physical change. The family as a whole also undergoes a metamorphosis as well. Initially, the members of the Samsa family appear hopeless and static, owing to the difficulties resulting from Gregors transformation as well as their financial predicament. But over time they are able to overcome their money problems, and when Gregor finally dies and the family no longer has to deal with his presence, all the family members are reinvigorated. As the story closes, they have completed an emotional transformation and their hope is revitalized.

Sleep and Rest

References to sleep and rest, as well as the lack of sleep and rest, recur throughout The Metamorphosis. The story opens, for instance, with Gregor waking from sleep to discover his transformation, and Part 2 of the story begins with Gregor waking a second time, in this instance late in the day after the incident in which his father drove him back into his room. He quickly crawls under the sofa in his room to rest, and he spends a great deal of the story beneath the sofa either resting quietly or anxious and unable to rest. Moreover, Gregor describes how his father used to while away the day in bed or dozing in his armchair, and after the father resumes working, he often refuses to go to bed in the evenings and instead falls asleep in uniform in his chair. Toward the end of the work, as Gregors health declines he stops sleeping almost entirely until finally he dies.

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Money
Because of the failure of the fathers business and the debts that resulted, money is a chief concern for the Samsa family, and consequently it appears as a frequent topic in Gregors thoughts and in the conversations of the family members. Gregors chief concern after discovering hes become an insect is that hell lose his job, which we quickly learn he took solely as a means of earning money for his family. The office manager also implies while checking on Gregor that Gregors boss suspects him of stealing money from the firm. Then, shortly after Gregor awakes at the beginning of Part 2, he overhears the father explaining the familys financial situation in detail to the mother and Grete. Later, the father and Grete both take jobs to make up for the loss of Gregors income, and the family even takes in a few borders as a means of bringing in extra money, which results in an argument about money after the borders discover Gregor.

Symbols The Picture of the Woman in Furs

Mentioned right at the outset of the story, the picture of the woman in furs serves as a symbol of Gregors former humanity. Exactly why the picture, which shows a woman wearing a fur hat, a fur boa, and a thick fur muff that covers her arms, originally attracted Gregor is never made clear (though it could be that it embodied Gregors desiresthe presumably attractive woman may be sexually alluring while the furs she wears could signal wealth to Gregor). But Gregors strong attachment to it does not derive from the content of the picture so much as from the fact that he put it on his wall when he was still human. He clings to it in panic when Grete and the mother are clearing out his room because, as he looks around the room in desperation, he sees it as one object from his former life that he can save. The content of the picture is irrelevant at that moment. It acts foremost as a reminder that a human lived there and chose that object to frame and display.

The Fathers Uniform

The uniform the father wears for his job symbolizes the fathers dignity, as well as Gregors shifting feelings of pity and respect for him. Throughout the story, we see the father primarily from Gregors point of view. We learn about the failure of the fathers business, for example, from Gregors thoughts as he overhears the father explaining the familys financial situation, and through Gregor we gain a picture of the father as a shiftless and depressed man whom Gregor appears to feel sorry for but not necessarily respect. But when Gregor runs out of his room in Part 2 and sees the father for the first time in weeks, Gregors opinion of the father changes.

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This shift is most evident through Gregors description of the fathers uniform, which gives the father an air of dignity: Gregor notices the smart blue uniform with gold buttons, and thinks the father looks to be in fine shape, suggesting the fathers self-respect has been restored, and with it Gregors respect for him. As the story continues, however, the father again declinesapparently from the pressure of living with Gregorand in the evenings Gregor watches him sleep in his uniform, now dirty and covered with grease spots. As a result, the dignity the uniform conveyed to the father deteriorates, and Gregor again looks at him with pity. (Notably, there is also a picture in the house of Gregor in uniform. It is an army uniform, and in the picture Gregor smiles, inviting one to respect his uniform and military bearing.)

Food
Food represents the way the members of the Samsa family feel toward Gregor. Notably, it is Grete, the family member Gregor feels closest to, who feeds Gregor for most of the story. At the beginning of Part 2, she leaves milk and bread for him, showing sympathy and consideration for him after his transformation, particularly as milk was one of his favorite foods when he was human. When she sees he hasnt drank the milk, she goes so far as to leave a tray of various foods out in order to discover what he now likes. Eventually, however, the work suggests that the family loses interest in feeding Gregor. One night, after the borders have moved in, the charwoman leaves his door open, and able to see everyone gathered, he watches as his mother feeds the borders. The scene causes Gregor to feel a great deal of resentment, and he thinks that he is starving while the borders stuff themselves, suggesting that as the members of the Samsa family have lost their sympathy for Gregor, they have stopped taking the same interest in feeding him. Significantly, the father inflicts the injury in Gregors back with an apple, and this wound appears to weaken Gregor and contribute to his death.

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Quotes

Post-modernism ismodernism with the optimism taken out. (JeanBaudrillard) Symbolism is no mereidle fancy or corrupt degeneration; it is inherent in the very texture of humanlife. Language itself is a symbolism. My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds arereal (Gustave Flaubert The secret of being a bore is to tell everything (Voltaire) Life well spent is long." (Leonardoda Vinci)

Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts againsttraditional philosophy

All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity. Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

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