Evolution of literature- Your views?

Answer 1

In the beginning, every culture had stories. Its stories were "myths", i.e. tales told to teach the young about their past, their values and their environment.

Some cultures (such as the Celts) told their stories in poetry, and the form became to them as important as the content.

Others (such as the Athenians) used writing to record their ideas as well as their history. A few people wrote books or plays.

All of this was for the same cultural purpose.

Then came Chaucer, and with him the dawn of English literature as we know it: stories told primarily for the delight of storytelling and of story reading, stories without a homily or any social-bonding purpose.

And then came the evolution of ideas and modern inventive society, and with it the expression of ideas in books like More's Utopia. With the concept of "science" as the way to know what is "fact" came the concept of "fiction", and so the novel.

Novels got gradually longer until the late 19th century, until a typical one was 500+ pages. Then they got gradually shorter again and now in the early 21st century a typical book is 180 pages long.

And of course literature, like many aspects of our culture, has subdivided into genres. We have "science fiction", "fantasy fiction", "romantic fiction" and so on.

Answer 2

Concepts like Arabic numbers, punctuation, typestyles and paragraph formatting all contributed to add clarity to what constitutes a thought.

None of the above was present in the ancient texts used to make up the modern Bible. The 10 Commandments are different for the Catholics and the Protestant because of their choice of the punctuation and where to make the paragraphs.

Pity the Ancient Greeks who used their alphabet as numbers.

History from the ancients has no quote marks. Instead the poetic device they used is an imaginary speech given to the public. Some of that crept into our Gospels.

It is only recent literature that gives lifelike qualities to conversations. As for example, it is hilarious in Frankenstein whereby the monster talks like an English butler.

Answer 3

The point is that we should avoid creating artificial borderlines. We sometimes say about contrasts, fights, conflicts between different conceptions - and that only revolutions make the literature evolve. Maybe. But it is also a slow development. Not only contestators were the best and important (though I prefer them!). So, for instance, we shouldn't talk only about differences of the vision of a man in ancient and middle ages, we shouldn't say that before people believed in a human being, and after - only in God. Middle ages are also ABOUT man - but in a different way. We have different wievs and conceptions today, but it also happens that authors come back to old ways of writing and they stick to tradition. Literature - that's a never ending story...