#18

Ancient Literature took place in what's known as the Bronze age. Writing systems date back to this time (3000 BC). Stories filled with strong tribal and familial loyalty, with polytheistic believers, and with pessimistic and powerless characters are all characteristics of Ancient Literature. An example of a work from this time includes The Epic of Gilgamesh. Other Homeric epics fall into this Ancient Literature category.

Classical Literature ushers in the development of drama, history as art, philosophy, and the increasingly sophisticated lyric poetry. Under this umbrella, we find the work of the Greeks: tragedies, comedies, philosophy.

English Literature begins with Beowulf in its Wessex dialect of Old English. Within English Literature division, we find Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Renaissance Literature includes many famous works: Cervantes' Don Quixote, Shakespeare's sonnets and plays, King James Bible, and Milton's Paradise Lost.

British Literature includes many important sub-sections: Restoration period, Romantic period, Victorian Era, British Realism, British Modernism. Enlightenment sensibility: balance and harmony; peace and prosperity; satiric wit all helped herald the growing literature in Britain at the time. Another factor that facilitated the growth of British Literature was the publishing of periodic essays for the middle class. Important works from these divisions of literary history include Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and many more.

American Literature can be broken down into many subheadings also: colonial American literature, early American, transcendentalist writings, American renaissance, realism, naturalist writings, and modernist writings and its responses (Multicultural/Contemporary/ Postmodern/Postsecular writings). When most people think of American author's, they probably think first to these from the modern fiction writers:
• F. Scod Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• William Faulkner (Nobel Prize), The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
• Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Out.