World Literature
From ancient epic to postmodern play — nine eras of world literature and their greatest books.
Choose a period
Ancient Literature
Literature of Ancient Greece and Rome (8th c. BC — 5th c. AD): epic, tragedy and mythological plots that laid the foundation of all European culture.
5 worksMedieval Literature
The age of chivalric epics, religious visions and allegory (5th–15th centuries), when literature joined the earthly and the divine.
3 worksRenaissance Literature
The Renaissance (14th–17th c.) — humanism, a new interest in man and a return to the heritage of antiquity.
3 worksClassicism
Classicism (17th–18th c.) — the cult of reason, the strict rule of the three unities and a clear hierarchy of genres.
2 worksSentimentalism
Sentimentalism (18th c.) values feeling over reason and discovers the inner world of ordinary people.
2 worksRomanticism
Romanticism (late 18th — first half of the 19th c.): exceptional heroes, strong passions and the conflict between dream and reality.
3 worksRealism
Realism (19th c.) — a truthful depiction of life: typical characters in typical circumstances.
4 worksModernism
Modernism (late 19th — 20th c.): stream of consciousness, bold formal experiment and a crisis of the familiar world view.
3 worksPostmodernism
Postmodernism (second half of the 20th c.): play, irony, intertextuality and a free mixing of genres.
3 works