Introduction to Western
Literature
周淑娟
http://web.nchu.edu.tw/pweb/index2.php?pid=
185&menu=2#
Guiding Questions for a Preliminary
Overall Preview
What are the two origins of Western
civilization?
When did modern Israel establish their
nation? And where?
What is the cause of the political
disturbances in the Middle East?
Which race does the Israelites belong to?
Guiding Questions for a Preliminary
Overall Preview
What is the religion the Israelites
believes in?
What is their holy scripture?
Have you ever heard of Palestine or the
Palestinians? What’s the problem
between them and the Israelites?
Which race does Christ belong to?
Guiding Questions for a Preliminary
Overall Preview
What is the holy book of Christianity?
Who are the people that caused Jesus
Christ’s death? And Why?
Do you know the relation (the differences)
between Judaism & Christianity?)
Have you ever heard of Ten
Commandments? Or Disney animation
Prince of Egypt?
Guiding Questions for a Preliminary
Overall Preview
In what language was the four gospels of
New Testament written?
What was the official religion of the later
Roman empire?
What is the British orthodox religion?
How did this religion come about?
Guiding Questions for a Preliminary
Overall Preview
Who is the official leader of the Church of
England?
Guiding Questions for a Preliminary
Overall Preview
Why did the Puritans
migrate to America?
Mapping Up the Development of
Western Civilization
East  West
South North
Structure of the Norton Textbook
I. Ancient Mediterranean and Near
Eastern Literature (1900 BCE onward)
II. Circling the Mediterranean: Europe and
the Islamic World (the beginning of CE—
15th century )
III. Europe and the New World: Early
Modernity (Renaissance)
Our Focus
I. The Hebrew Bible (ca. 1000—300 BCE)
II. The Greek & Roman World
----Homer (8th century BCE)
----Aeschylus; Sophocles; Euripides
(5th century BCE)
----Virgil (1th century BCE)
III. The Christian Bible:
(the New Testament; 1th century CE)
I. Ancient Mediterranean & Near
Eastern Literature
1. Near Eastern
(Mesopotamia; Egypt; the Hebrews)
2. The Greeks
3. Rome
The Invention of Writing
Oral literature  Written literature
First appearance of writing
place: Mesopotamia (Tigris & Euphrates
rivers)
Material: tablets of wet clay
1. 3300 – 2900 BCE (inscriptions with a
pointed stick)
2. 2800 BCE: cuneiform (wedge-shaped; 楔
形文字)
---(Sumerian epic Gilgamesh; ca1900—250
BCE)
The Fertile Crescent (肥沃月灣) :
Euphrates & Tigris
Sumerians （3000 BCE)
Babylonians (Hammurabi\ˌha-mə-ˈrä-bē\; ca. 17281686 BEC)
Assyrians
The Deplorable History of the
Hebrews
tribal period （ca. 2000-1005 BCE）
empirical period （1005-925 BCE）
the divided kingdom: Israel: 721 BCE
Judah: 612 BCE
Ruled by various alien races:
--Assyrian Empire (746-609 BCE)
--Babylonian Empire (609-539 BCE)
--Macedonian Empire (336-323 BCE)
--Roman Empire (509 BCE--)
--Byzantine [bɪˋzæntɪn] Empire (--AD 1453)
Egypt (North Africa)
Egypt (3000 BCE)
Macedonia
（Alexander the Great; 326-323 BCE）
Ptolemy’s Greek dynasty
(till Cleopatra died in 30 BCE; )
The Roman Rule:
(the period when the New Testament
was written）
Other Forms of Writing 1
Place: Egypt
Location:
temple walls and public monuments
Form: hieroglyphic (sacred, carving)
(pictographic; 象形文字)
Other Forms of Writing 2: The
Phoenicians
The language that survived, in modified
forms, until the present day
Adopted by the ancient Hebrews
Modified by the Greeks
Passed down by Romans
Their Cultures 1
Economic dependence on slaves
Heavy reliance on natural resources:
agriculture and animal husbandry
---valley of the Nile (Thebes & Memphis)
---valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers
(Babylon & Nineveh; Fertile Crescent)
Their Cultures 2
Time: 2nd millennium BCE onward
The Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans
Mediterranean & Near East: A
Single Unit
Large-scale cultural exchanges
Ex. Greek sculpture & architecture (7th
BCE)  Egypt
Striking similarities between Greek and
Near Eastern myths
Religion
Most were polytheistic
Gods often reinvented from one place to
another (cross-cultural influence)
Exceptions: the Egyptian & Hebrew god
Religious practice (orthopraxy) more
important than religious belief (orthodoxy)
Exception: the Hebrew—religion linked to
moral code
The Greeks
Language: Indo-European (印歐語系)
First cultural blossom: Minoan (King Minos)
Time: 2nd millennium BCE
Place: Crete
Citadel: Mycenae
Palace: Pylos
Knowledge of writing
The Dark Ages of Greece
The Minoan culture destroyed, together
with its writing system, by fire in the last
century of the millennium
11th—8th century BCE: illiterate
The appearance of a new Greek
culture
8th century BCE: literate again
New language system: borrowed from the
Phoenicians
Made up of many independent cities:
city-states: rivals and fierce competitors
land of mountain barriers and scattered
islands
The Greek Colonization
period: 8th & 7th century BCE
Location: all over the Mediterranean coast,
including the coast of Asia Minor
It was in the cities founded on the Asian
coast that the Greeks adapted the
Phoenician system of writing
The Persian invasion of Greece
Period: 490—479 BCE
Result: the Greeks won under the
leadership of Athens and Sparta
Effect: the Athenians produced their most
important literary and cultural
achievement
The Film: 300
Sparta vs. Athens
Sparta:
---Oligarchy (“rule of the few”)
---strict military discipline
---superior land army  controlled majority
of the city-states of the Peloponnese
Sparta vs. Athens
Attica (Athens as its leading city):
---direct democracy (excluding women,
slaves & resident aliens)
---women with especially low autonomy than
other city-states
---strong fleet power  naval alliance
Peloponnesian War
Conflict: Athens vs. Sparta
Period: 431—404 BCE
Result: total defeat of Athens
Effect: great political and cultural changes
Changes in Athens
Self-confidence  social tensions &
anxieties
Cultural & intellectual prosperity
---1st anthropological historian: Herodotus
---1st political historian: Thucydides
---the dawning of prose literature
---the great age of Athenian theater:
tragedy & comedy
Changes in Athens: Education
Before: based on the poems of Homer
Now: stressing public speaking
Sophists (wisdom teachers; 詭辯學家)
Subjects: the techniques of rhetoric;
government; ethics; literary criticism;
astronomy
Result: generation gap (“Man is the
measure of all things.”
A particular Sophist:
Socrates (who taught without fee)
Investigating ethics, politics, and truth
Method: dialectics (question and answer)
Belief: the possibility of true goodness
His most brilliant student: Plato
Historical significance: the starting point
for all later Western philosophy
The decline of Athens
The whole traditional basis of individual
conduct, stressing the concern for the
unity of the city-state, was undermined.
The surrender to Spartan in 404 BCE
The execution of Socrates
The defeat by Macedon (馬其頓王國)in
338 BCE
Macedon and Alexander
The great empire that extended into Egypt
in the south and to the borders of India in
the east
Alexander’s death in 323 BCE a number
of independent kingdoms rules by his
generals (the Hellenistic age)
Ptolemy  Cleopatra 埃及豔后 (died with
the Roman conquest)
The Hellenistic Age: A GreekSpeaking World
The immigration of the Greeks to the
newly conquered territories
The great Hellenistic cities grew out of the
earlier city-state model and continued
many of its civic and political institutions.
At Alexandria, in Egypt, a Greek library
was formed.
The Hellenistic Age: A GreekSpeaking World
The Middle-East became a Greekspeaking region
The accounts of life and teaching of Jesus
of Nazareth were recorded in the simple
vernacular Greek know as koine.
Rome: History
Dominated most of the Italian peninsula by
the middle of the 3rd century BCE.
Expansion southward brought collision
with Carthage, the greatest power in the
western Mediterranean.
A world power in 201 BCE with its victory
over Carthage.
Rome: Political System
A republic from around 509 BCE
Power was shared among Senate (元老院) ,
the Assemblies (議會) , and Magistrates (政務
官) .
The republic would last until 1st BCE.
Rome: Culture
Seeing conflict as deadly
Stressing a sense of tradition which valued
seriousness, manly courage, industry, and
above all, duty
the basis of the Roman power: efficiency
and strength through unity
a legal code that formed the model for all
later European and American law
Rome: the talent for practical affairs
Sewers
Baths with hot and cold water
Straight roads
Aqueducts to last two thousand years
The Middle Ages
The rule of the Church
vernacular literature besides Latin; Islamic
culture
the age of faith: religious literature
the age of chivalry：knights offering
protection against invaders
The Story of King Arthur
Renaissance (文藝復興)
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
Human beings became again the center of
intellectual inquiries.
The Beginning of Modernity
travel & discovery：Captain John Smith
（Pocahontas ）
Reformation：--Protestants vs.
Roman Catholic Church
--Church of England vs.
Puritanism
Major Writes
I. The Classical Period
Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey
Aeschylus: the Greek Tragedist
(524?-456 BCE)
Oresteia
A trilogy
Agamemnon
Sophocles: the Greek Tragedist
(ca. 496-406 BCE)
Oedipus the King
Euripides: the Greek Tragedist
(480-406 BCE)
Medea
A tragedy with feminist
thought
Plato: the Greek Philosopher
(429-347 BCE)
Philosophical writing
in the form of dialogue
Symposium
(Drinking Party; 饗宴篇)
Virgil: the Roman Poet
(70-19 BCE)
The Aeneid
Epic written by a single author
The story about the origin
of the Roman empire
Augustine: the Roman Theologist
II. The Middle Ages
Beowulf
Epic written in old
English
Author unknown
ca. the 9th century
The Song of Roland
Epic about chivalry
(Charlemagne )
Written in French
ca. 1100 AD
Dante Alighieri: (1265-1321 AD)
The Divine Comedy
Written in Italian
Boccaccio: (1313-1375)
Decameron: written in Italian
Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
Romance written in middle English
Story about King Arthur’s knight
Author unknown
ca. 1380 AD
Sir Thomas Malory:
The British Writer (1405-1471)
Morte Darthur (Death of Arthur)
Religious, chivalric themes
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury
Tales
1340-1400 AD
Written in middle English
Everyman (middle English)
Morality play written in middle English
Allegory
Author unknown
ca. 1495
III. Renaissance
Francis Petrarch: The Italian Poet
(1304-1347 AD)
Father of humanism
Sonnets
Francois Rabelais: (1495-1533 AD)
Gargantua and Pantagruel (巨人傳)
Written in French
the story of two giants
amusing, extravagant, and satirical
descriptions of humanistic
ideals of the time
Desiderius Erasmus: 1466?-1536 AD
Dutch renaissance humanist
The Praise of Folly (Latin)
A satirical examination of
pious but superstitious
abuses of Catholic doctrine
Niccolo Machiavelli: The Italian
Philosopher (1469-1527 AD)
The Prince (君王論)
Written in Italian
Treatise on the need for stability in a
prince’s principality; at stake is its
preservation
Miguel Cervantes:
The Spanish Writer (1547-1616 AD)
Don Quixote
Written in Spanish
A picaresque novel mocking
chivalric romance
William Shakespeare:
The British Writer (1564-1616 AD)
Sonnets
Plays
Hamlet;
Romeo & Juliet
John Milton: The British Epic Writer
(1608-1647)
Paradise Lost
Question or Suggestion?