توضیحات

Chapter 1 - History of Literature

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries brought with them the common Germanic meter; but of their earliest oral poetry, probably used for panegyric, magic, and short narrative, little or none survives. For nearly a century after the conversion of King Ethelbert I of Kent to Christianity about 600, there is no evidence that the English wrote poetry in their own language. But  in his Historian ecclesiastical genies Anglo rum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), wrote that in the late 7th century Caedmon, an illiterate   to compose a short hymn in praise of the creation. Caedmon later composed verses based on), but only the Hymn of Creation survives. Caedmon legitimized the native verse form by adapting it to Christian themes. gave England a body of vernacular poetry unparalleled in Europe before the end of the 1st millennium (Danker  , 2008).

Virtually all Old English poetry is written in a single meter, a four-stress line with a syntactical break, or caesura, between the second and third stresses, and with alliteration linking the two halves of the line; this pattern is occasionally varied by six-stress lines. The poetry is formulaic, drawing on a common set of stock phrases and phrase patterns, applying classes of characters, and depicting scenery with such recurring images as the eagle and the wolf, which wait during battles to feast on carrion, and ice and snow, which appear in the landscape to signal sorrow (Arnold, 2011).

 In the best poems such formulas, far from being tedious, give a strong impression of the richness of the cultural fund from which poets could draw. Other standard devices of this poetry are the kenning, a figurative name for a thing, usually expressed in a compound noun (e.g., swan-road used to name the sea); and variation, the repeating of a single idea in different words, with each repetition adding a new level of meaning. That these verse techniques changed little during 400 years of literary production suggests the extreme conservatism of Anglo-Saxon culture  (Arnold, 2011).

Few poems can be dated as closely as Caedmon’s Hymn. King Alfred’s compositions fall into the late 9th century, and Bede composed his Death Song within 50 days of his death on May 25, 735. Historical poems such as The Battle of Brunanburh (after 937) and The Battle of Maldon (after 991) are fixed by the dates of the events they commemorate (Eagleton, 1989).

 A translation of one of Aldhelm’s riddles is found not only in the Exeter Book but also in an early 9th-century manuscript at Leiden, Neth. And at least a part of The Dream of the Rood can be dated by an excerpt carved on the 8th-century Ruthwell Cross (in Dumfriesshires, Scot.). But in the absence of such indications, Old English poems are hard to date, and the scholarly consensus that most were composed in the Midlands and the North in the 8th and 9th centuries gave way to uncertainty during the last two decades of the 20th century (Roberto, 2015).

Many now hold that The Wanderer, Beowulf, and other poems once assumed to have been written in the 8th century are of the 9th century or later. For most poems, there is no scholarly consensus beyond the belief that they were written between the 8th and the 11th centuries (Helena Kelly, 2021).

1 . 1 .Literature and its kind  

The word literature as understood by Westerners is generally referred to as written works or written letters. In that scope, people may consider poetry, short stories, novels, drama, books of all kinds, as well as things like sales‟ brochures, magazines, newspapers as pieces of literature. In Africa, literature is mainly seen as any written or oral composition or material which has an artistic value including written works, as in the above, as well as oral works such as riddles, songs, dances, folktales, legends, proverbs and many other artistic creations  (Danker , 2008).

 In its simplistic definition, literature is any written or spoken material on a specific subject or theme that has an artistic value and its medium of conveyance is chiefly language and speech. It can also be seen as a field of study that deals with all the imaginative sayings or writings of a group of people in a community, a place and others. In the same dynamics, Agyekum opines that: Literature is the artistic, imaginative and creative expression of individual and group experiences, nature, and values of a group of people over a certain period of time by the medium of language whether written or oral. It is the representation of life experience and reality of the world through linguistic creativity and imagination Thereafter, it becomes crucial to emphasize and specify that there are two types of literature which are: oral and written literatures as slightly mentioned in the introduction, but oral literature is this type of literature that is handed down from generation to generation by the words of the mouth. Examples of oral literature include folklore, folktales, myths, legends, riddles, proverbs, praise songs, etc. As for written literature, it refers to the different literary genres such as novel, poetry, drama, short stories and essays (Danker, 2008).

Besides, literature is a reflection of man’s inner life and feelings as well as the outer world in which the artist is born or lives. It makes a connection between man and society and, it does not and cannot ignore the claims of the outside world: the audience, the reader and the masses. That is why, referring to the production of literature, it is said that  . In short, literature, as to John Morley, is a collection of books. Those books could be books of poetry, drama or novels. He goes on arguing that no exclusion can be made in respect of the country of origin of the books, nor the time of composition or the language used (Roberto, 2015)

 In like manner, he concludes that literature is a global heritage which opulence is increased every year. On another plan, literature is supposed to be universal in terms of humanistic values and justice but this may vary from one geographical location to another because of the manifold cultural ideological particularities of each racial and cultural location. Nevertheless, literature is to be comprehended as a more or less true picture, or inspiration of actual life and there actually exists a universal commonality between worldly literatures in spite of the fact that every country has its own literature which mirrors its socio-political life and cultural specificities (Roberto, 2015).

 It is also pertinent to specify that every literature is not only an expression of emotions, of ideas and ideals, which have a permanent value and which are of interest for men in every age and in every country, but it is also the locus whereby cultural beliefs and practices and historical references of a people are preserved. It is the sum total of all these which have engendered and maintained the permanence and universality of great literary canons left behind by peoples in remote ages and countries. This is why Homer‟s Iliad (translation in November 2011 by Richmond Lattimore) and Virgil‟s Aenied (19 B.C.E. Translated by John Dryden) written in ancient Greece and Rome are still read and enjoyed by many people all around the world with different interpretations and appreciations (Helena Kelly, 2021).

خلاصه تحقیق

It is transparent that literature shows versatile dimension and deals with every aspect of life more or less. It is to be mentioned that the viewpoint of grasping and the degree of infusing in the conscience of the same literary work can be different in case of different people from different social, political, cultural, economic or intellectual background. There is a lot of stimulating ingredients in literature that can influence life. One has to grab that accordingly

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