essay on world literature

Essays on World Literature by Ismail Kadare

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Ismail Kadare’s first and only collection of essays translated into English, this time directly from the Albanian originals written between 1985 and 2006, offers profound and highly personal meditations on canonical figures of world literary history. Together, the essays consider the circulation of “world” literature (always distinctly European, and by men, in Kadare’s account) in Albania and, in doing so, argue for the significance of tragedy to Balkan people’s lives, imaginations, and self-identification. This includes the impulse to elide cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and historical differences in service of a distinct “Balkanness” that attests to the unifying pain of ethno/geocultural conflict over the millennia.

Kadare reflects in three essays on “great” writers in the world literary tradition: Aeschylus, whom he calls the “lost”; Dante, the “inevitable”; and Shakespeare, the “difficult prince.” Kadare’s essays provide histories of these writers’ place in the Albanian intellectual and mythohistorical imaginaries as well as in Kadare’s own thinking about the purpose of writing. Aeschylus enjoys a more or less constant presence, but Dante and Shakespeare are latecomers as a result of repressive Ottoman rule, arriving in Albanian translations only following independence in the twentieth century. Dante makes a particular impression on Kadare, who says that the Florentine poet’s greatest lesson was that “the natural state of the great writer is . . . to travel alive among the dead.” Dante is thus figured as the ultimate poet of the Albanian experience; “Dantesque” describes nothing if not the spiraling centuries of Albanian life under multiple empires and then Hoxha.

Aeschylus, the topic of his earliest and longest essay, represents to Kadare the largely lost origin of world literature and thus of “civilization” itself; though Greek, Aeschylus’s sense of the tragic emerged from a uniquely Balkan understanding of mourning, Kadare argues, and he was therefore, like any Albanian, haunted by pains peculiar to Balkan life. Shakespeare’s Hamlet , in the final essay, represents the “impossible drama” of Albania, of the blood feuds of the traditional Albanian legal code, the Kanun, and of the centuries of ceaseless squabble over land, power, and identity that, like Hamlet’s own blood feud, made life a tragedy.

In his indelibly humanist understanding of art, Kadare conceives of literature—the work of canonically great writers—as art that “cries with the world,” seeking through letters to understand the uniquely and most deeply human: tragedy, violence, pain. He adopts the language “crying with the world” from a Gjirokastër idiom that describes intimate mourning among relatives and nonrelatives alike; tragedy, for Kadare, speaking always through the violent history of the Balkans, is a binding tie among the people of Albania and its neighbors, the purest if the most painful source of literary inspiration.

Literature as a “crying with the world” is not only a lament for the self but also a reminder of those hurt in the production of the self. Kadare attests as much in his reading of Homer, one who made the Greeks’ deceitful destruction of the Trojans, murdered while they slept, the basis of Greece’s greatest epic of unified mythohistoric selfhood.

Through his provocations on Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, and the vicissitudes of Albanian history, Kadare argues that to see Albanian literature as world literature is to see Albania simultaneously as the subject of its own self-inflicted tragedy and as the object of violence committed against it. It is to see Albania as European and therefore part of Europe’s imperialist history; within Europe, as unremittingly Balkan and thus always peripheral to the flows of European power; and among them all, as an ethno/geocultural essence apart—lost like the origins of tragedy, inevitable like the violence of the political, difficult like the ghosts of the past. The “world” of Kadare’s three essays on “world literature” is a reflection of Albania’s “impossible drama” on the global scale of human history, an observation at once parochial and profound, like the greatness of great art.

Sean Guynes-Vishniac Michigan State University

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Writing about World Literature

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The diversity of stories and poems available from around the world makes writing a world literature paper a fascinating experience. At the same time, dealing with texts from different cultures, languages, and time periods presents challenges. Here are six questions to help you through the writing process. Click the link at the top of the page to find a worksheet that will help you organize your notes when writing a world literature paper.

1) What is the assignment?

Make sure you understand what the assignment is asking you to do. Here is a list of common world literature papers (adapted from Karen Gocsik’s Writing about World Literature ):

Literary Analysis

Goal: Explore an image, theme or other element in a text and come to a conclusion about how that element relates to the work as a whole. See the OWL's PowerPoint workshop on literary analysis .

Historical Analysis

Goal: Demonstrate the relationship between a text and its political, cultural, or social environment and argue for the significance of this relationship.

Comparison Paper

Goal: Compare or contrast two texts in order to draw a conclusion about their worldviews, values, rhetorical aims, or literary styles. The following two assignments are types of comparison papers.

Writing about Adaptation

Goal: Compare a literary work to a later work that creatively responds to it (e.g., Disney’s The Lion King as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet ). Make an argument about the significance of the similarities and differences between the original and the adaptation.

Writing about Translation

Goal: Compare two or more different translations of a work. Evaluate the translators’ decisions about certain textual aspects and make an argument about how these decisions exemplify different perspectives on the text as a whole.

2) What are the social and historical contexts?

Research the author and time period, consulting, for example, the introduction in an anthologyor The Dictionary of Literary Biography . Make sure that your interpretation of the text makes sense in light of its contexts. Be careful not to make blanket assumptions about cultures, countries, or time periods, and remember that literary movements are expressed in different ways by different writers. American romanticism is not the same thing as German romanticism.

3) What is the genre?

A genre is a type of composition that has its own characteristic forms, styles, and themes. Genres can vary across cultures.

4) Are you reading the text in translation?

If so, consider what may have been lost in translation. When using a translation as your source text, do not ground your argument on word choice, sentence structure, or rhyme scheme unless you can refer back to the original language.

5) What is your thesis?

Your thesis should put forward an argument rather than merely offer a description or observation. Ask the following questions: What is the significance of your interpretation? How does your interpretation help us to better understand the work as a whole?

Here is an example of a descriptive thesis . It is too obvious and does not constitute a real argument.

Here is an example of an argumentative thesis . It offers an interpretation of the characters of Achilles and Hector that sheds light on the meaning of the work as a whole.

6) Are your citations correct?

When you quote from your sources, be sure to cite correctly.

Here is an example that shows how to quote a primary source from an anthology in MLA style.

Then, in the Works Cited , provide full bibliographic information for the source:

Works Consulted

Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

---, ed. Teaching World Literature . New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009.

---. What Is World Literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Gocsik, Karen. Writing about World Literature. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012.

*Special thanks to the World Literature teachers of Purdue University for sharing their insights.

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On the Horizon of World Literature review

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Daniel Dooghan’s review of On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China , by Emily Sun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/dooghan/ . My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, editor

By Emily Sun

Reviewed by Daniel Dooghan

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June 2021)

Emily Sun, On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China . New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. x+167 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8232-9479-4.

Narrating the encounter of Chinese and European literature in 1827 Weimar is almost  de rigueur  in accounts of “world literature.” Goethe is said to have inaugurated the term during a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, but this alone is of limited interest. What the term does is to crystallize for that moment a number of political, economic, and aesthetic projects that antedate and follow the conversation, offering a vision of a literary totality. The utopian spirit of that vision—however evanescent—has driven the boom in studies of world literature over the past two decades, and though the ensuing debates have questioned the nature and desirability of such an aesthetic utopia, they have also illuminated the vast network of global connections that enabled Goethe to make his pronouncement. These works on world literature, far from genuflecting to the poet’s example, reveal more about that network and the possibilities of world literature as a concept. Emily Sun’s  On the Horizon of World Literature  is one of these works.

Predictably, then, the introduction, “Reading Literary Modernities on the Horizon of World Literature,” begins with Goethe to illustrate its thesis and its method. Sun shows how the temporally and geographically distant concept of world literature manifests in China as part of a revolutionary project beginning at the turn of the last century (1-2). From this remote affinity she seeks to articulate how world literature “designates a framework for processes of textual classification, revaluation, and production in a plurality of connected yet differently inherited and inhabited lifeworlds” (2). In this framing capacity, world literature is inextricably linked to the discipline of comparative literature and to the possibility of cross-cultural comparison. Moreover, Sun retains some Goethean hope by offering world literature “as an ideal that continues to orient and motivate ongoing exposure to and exchange with the foreign” (3). Whatever its theoretical limitations, world literature for Sun is not just a term of literary criticism, but a metaphysical project: “the ‘world’ of ‘world literature’ does not already exist as the equivalent of a map or other representation of the inhabited globe, but rather continually comes into being as that which is activated and reactivated in the processes of exposure and exchange” (3). The texts analyzed in the book exemplify these processes, as does Sun’s staging of them.

Sun offers a theoretical introduction that situates her book among the major recent works on world literature. More provocatively, she draws on the history of world literature—the Goethe story—as well as the invention of national literatures to challenge the methodologies of comparative literature to address what she describes as plural, Borgesian modernities (11-12). To accomplish this, Sun adduces four pairs of texts in the body chapters. The pairings match Romantic-era English texts with related—however distantly—works from twentieth-century China. In the first, she reads the Romantic manifesto of Percy Shelley,  A Defence of Poetry  in concert with two abstruse essays by Lu Xun (魯迅) in which he advocates for literary renewal as spiritual renewal. Chapter 2 investigates the multiple adaptations of Shakespeare through Charles and Mary Lamb’s  Tales from Shakespeare  and Lin Shu’s (林紓) translation of that work, with an eye to the envisioned audience of both works. The following chapter returns to Charles Lamb, linking him with Zhou Zuoren (周作人) to look at how their respective essay forms inaugurate a kind of reflective realism. The much longer final chapter compares Jane Austen’s  Mansfield Park  with  The Rouge of the North  by Eileen Chang (張愛玲). Here Sun executes a complex meditation on genre and its relationship to gendered identity and agency. The book concludes with a brief recapitulation of its theoretical aims and an invitation to further employ its methodology.

That methodology gets discussed in detail in the introduction. Juxtaposition is her tactic, both to trace interesting textual genealogies and to find ways to evaluate how those genealogies express lived, local modernities. She mobilizes the concept world literature as a means of enabling this comparative work. Here, world literature is the totality of “provincialized” regions (4). This is something of a convenient fiction—which she acknowledges—to bootstrap a more robust understanding of the term. “The notion of world literature,” she argues,

can thus be said to serve as the horizon for literary modernity in two senses and on two levels: on one level, as the framework for the encounter and connection between national or regional literary histories and literary modernities, which define and redefine themselves dialectically in relation to one another; and, on another, as that which, in a more abstract sense, orients them, including orienting them mutually toward one another. (9)

This allows Sun to assert a shared global modernity while registering how the reactions to that modernity depend on local history and lived experience. The transmission of not only texts but also genres is Sun’s empirical justification for her theoretical project. The genres she selects travel from England to China, evincing a shared literary world, but also emerge from local, historically conditioned literary practices. Capturing this tension between worldly genres and their local instantiations is the object of the close readings that follow. Through them, Sun argues, “My study traces culturally heterogeneous antecedents that inform and animate comparable creative practices and attends as well to the ways the English and Chinese texts in question register the promises and perils of mechanisms of technoeconomic homogenization that were likewise reorganizing human life in the global long nineteenth century” (22). Intense, comparative investigation of the local reveals the global.

In chapter 1, “Literary Modernity and the Emancipation of Voice: Defences of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lu Xun,” the pairing of Shelley and Lu Xun finds common ground in what Sun identifies as their shared use of the manifesto genre. Sun defends generically linking the former’s  Defence of Poetry  (1821) and the latter’s 1908 essays “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (摩羅詩力說) and “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices” (破惡聲論) by situating Lu Xun’s essays among contemporary manifestos and positioning Shelley’s text as their forerunner (38-39). Moreover, the pieces have similar aims, and perhaps more importantly for Sun’s purposes, Shelley—if not this piece exactly—figures in the “Mara” essay as one of the Mara (Romantic) poets. Lu Xun’s concern for poetic voice and its relationship to internationalism animates Sun’s readings (33). Sun offers several close readings of Lu Xun’s use of an esoteric, idiosyncratic  wenyan  in these essays, arguing, “This stylistic decision serves as a corollary to the content of his essay’s call for cultural and discursive renewal in relation to the Mara poets and informs his complex and temporally non-linear view of Chinese literary and cultural modernity” (34). Thus, his interest in cultivating revolutionary Chinese voices like those of the Romantic poets he features in “Mara” does not involve the rejection of the Chinese literary tradition, even in its more esoteric forms.

This split gaze, at both the world and the past, has a liberatory goal. Sun sees similar appeals in Shelley and Lu Xun’s “Refutation” regarding the possibility of human freedom in the face of an impersonal, universalizing modernity: “Lu Xun would seem to enter into conversation with Shelley in his conception of modernity in terms of an emancipation of poetic voice and in his critique of a model that privileges instrumental rationality” (42). This voice is  xinsheng  (心聲), which Sun glosses as “the voice of the heart,” which “serves as the externalization of singular and original interiority” (44). It contrasts with the malevolent voices of the title, which seek a modernity born of a rupture with the past (45). Combating this rupture links the manifestos of Shelley and Lu Xun. Where Shelley’s rewritings privilege how a poetry in dialogue with its antecedents innervates both itself and its readers, Lu Xun’s archaizing style demonstrates how his emancipatory, modern  xinsheng  is grounded in Chinese tradition (46-47). For Sun, both manifestos see poetry as a way of confronting the totalizing effects of Enlightenment rationality, and the indirect—though not serendipitous—resonances between them underscore how the experience of a shared modernity is paradoxically both local and historically grounded (48-49).

Chapter 2, “Shakespearean Retellings and the Question of the Common Reader: Charles and Mary Lamb’s  Tales from Shakespeare  and Lin Shu’s  Yinbian Yanyu ,” examines how a pair of texts work to produce a broad reading public. It matches the Lambs’ 1807 collection,  Tales from Shakespeare , with its 1904 Chinese adaptation by Lin Shu,  Yinbian Yanyu  (吟邊燕語). Sun notes that the  Tales  envisions a world in which sociopolitical consistency reigns, separate from the upheavals of the past represented in the missing English history plays (55). As a result, “The common reader that the  Tales from Shakespeare  addresses is in an unheroic or post-heroic subject,” who “is cued to recognize and read positions within a structure that orders loci of power and action” (58). The  Tales  are didactic works for future bourgeois subjects, “English children” (55). Lin’s free translation into classical Chinese, “addressed primarily to Chinese adults” (ibid) has different aims. Sun sees in Lin’s use of contemporary neologisms amidst his classical prose a recognition of a changing world; on the other hand, she notes, he takes care to highlight what elements of Shakespeare resemble Chinese texts, recalling the fantastic  chuanqi  (傳奇) genre (59). As in her reading of Lu Xun, Sun sees this interplay of global present and local past as a political gesture: “Against contemporaries who embrace the new as a rejection of the past, Lin seems effectively to approach the new as a particular and selective renewal of elements of the Chinese past in correlation, if not direct conversation, with Western culture” (62). Sun offers comparative close readings of both collections’ versions of  The Tempest , concluding that both “present a dioramic vision of social life and may be said curiously to double one another by situating characters and readers—and characters as readers/spectators—on a distinctly unheroic, indeed middling plane as agents of decentralized, distributed power” (69). Both versions take up the theme of freedom—Miranda’s, Prospero’s, Ariel’s—as benignly constrained, not absolute. Instead, Sun sees these deployments of freedom as indicative of new social and political forms tied to the rise of new economic forms first in Britain, then China (72). Through what is ostensibly the same content, both texts respond to local experiences of an asynchronously shared global economic phenomenon: capital and empire, though curiously unstated as such.

In the following chapter, “Estrangements of the World in the Familiar Essay: Charles Lamb and Zhou Zuoren’s Approaches to the Ordinary,” Sun shifts her comparative investigation from the tale anthology to the familiar essay. She continues with Charles Lamb, whom she places in “oblique conversation” with Zhou Zuoren as “part of asynchronous moments in separate, heterogeneous, and intertwined modernities” (75). The conversation takes place via the juxtaposition of Zhou’s 1924 essay “Wild Vegetables of My Hometown” and Lamb’s 1823 piece “Old China.” Sun presents Zhou and Lamb as an apt match due to their participation in eras of cultural ferment—the wake of the French Revolution and flowering of Romanticism for Lamb, and the May Fourth movement for Zhou—as well as their shared interest in the essay form. Lamb’s piece is a meditation from his alter-ego, Elia, on a porcelain tea set. His musings on the art of the chinaware attract Sun’s interest because they move outside the hegemony of Renaissance perspectivism and “bespeak a somewhat comical struggle between the language of mathematical space and the anachronistic and culturally inappropriate language of ‘wild ekphrasis’” (84). The essay thus emerges as a critique of a flattening and universalizing realism.

With similar aims, Sun calls attention to Zhou’s reference to multiple imperial-era texts to contextualize quotidian activities surrounding local flora (86-87). Zhou delights in the description of those activities, which Sun demonstrates through careful analysis (87-88). As a result, the essay’s textures of narration and reference place in dialectical tension a contemporary spirit of inquiry with received knowledge (89). Although Lamb’s and Zhou’s essays have different aims, the conditions of their production result in similar effects in their critique of the experience of modernity. Central to that experience is the assumption of a homogeneous, familiar readership. Despite showing “the very condition of these readers’ averageness, a statistical concept that was part and parcel of the infrastructure of the ordinary emergent in the age of political economy . . . Lamb’s writing also sheds light on the limitations and precarious provisionality of the realist construction of the ordinary” (90). Zhou, similarly, “uses the mode of taxonomic lyricism as a medium of address to the reader, recovering in the ordering tendencies of traditional Chinese thought and discourse terms for a decentralized and pluralist inhabitation of the ordinary” (90). Casting the two authors as “distant peers” allows Sun to identify an emergent critique of a global normalcy that gestures to the contingency of its experience (91). That this contingency is predicated on capital is again elided, though her mention of “the satellitic supra-perspective that governs our everyday lives today” is a suggestive gloss (91).

The more substantial final chapter, “Between the Theater and the Novel: Woman, Modernity, and the Restaging of the Ordinary in  Mansfield Park  and  The Rouge of the North, ” examines the function of the domestic novel in the hands of Jane Austen and Eileen Chang. Sun notes the similar interests of the writers as ground for their juxtaposition, from which she derives the chapter’s animating question: “what might it mean to read the category of ‘world’ itself through the category of ‘woman?’” (94). To answer this, she deploys a complex analysis of how both novels nest dramatic works within them to stage the changing roles of “‘woman’ as modern agent and spectatorial subject on the plane of the ordinary” (95). Austen’s 1814  Mansfield Park  and Chang’s 1967  The Rouge of the North  (怨女, 1955) both use the household to represent broader socioeconomic transformations. For Sun, these changes resonate, but are not identical: Austen’s focus concerns the growth and character of British commerce, whereas Chang examines the reconfigurations of Confucian patriarchy in the early twentieth century (103). The vehicle for these representations is the stage.  Mansfield Park  features a rehearsal of Elizabeth Inchbald’s  Lovers’ Vows , the casting of which, Sun argues, serves to dramatize the movement of heroine Fanny Price from marginality to modest agency in the novel.

Sun finds a resonance with Austen in  The Rouge of the North ’s concern with theatrical performance. An episode at the beginning of Chang’s novel, Sun argues (119), frames the dramatic genre as a defamiliarizing lens through which to view China. As with her interpretation of  Mansfield Park , Sun casts the household setting of  The Rouge of the North  as a dramatic space in which historical change is staged, and similarly calls attention to the novel’s representation of Peking opera. A careful exegesis illustrates how the appearance of women in female roles, as opposed to  dan  (旦) performers, forces a reckoning for the protagonist, Yindi, between the evolving visibility of women in the public sphere versus her domestic agency (123-126). That Peking opera is the vehicle for this reckoning continues Sun’s theme of a local modernity predicated on continuity with cultural antecedents (128). That Austen makes similar moves through her inclusion of earlier English drama points toward what Sun calls a “genuine cosmopolitanism,” which “supplements, complicates, and tilts the instrumentalist and flat uniformity of such a global order with the multi-dimensionality of worlds inhabited in languages that bear the heterogeneous histories of operativity and affectivity” (134). This revelation—another subtle critique of capital—is the prize of Sun’s comparative method. The seemingly apt juxtapositions invited by shared, modern genres across languages give way under analysis to the emergence of historical contingency and, thus, plural modernities.

The fourth chapter’s comparative length, at about double that of the other three, points to an unevenness in the book, which is otherwise methodologically and thematically consistent. The earlier chapters read as if they were whittled down from a larger work or set of works. The Shelley-Lu Xun chapter in particular is a bit hasty, and the return to Charles Lamb in chapter 3 seems oddly unaware of his appearance in chapter 2. The strength of Sun’s close readings—if occasionally a bit speculative—will likely make many readers eager for a longer, more comprehensive treatment. Similarly, as interesting as all of the texts are, they fit perhaps too neatly into the vision of world literature laid out in the introduction and may not be representative of the larger picture: Lu Xun’s “Malevolent Voices,” for example, was originally published in an obscure journal and not reprinted until after his death. On the other hand, the selections may not need to be representative, given Sun’s vision of world literature as asynchronous resonance, drawing on Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” (72). Still, the book leaves as an open question whether its model of a world literature built from such self-consciously reflective works is scalable beyond this curated selection of texts. Despite the ambition of the introduction, its conception of the world in world literature remains undertheorized. Although an economic thread runs through the book, engagements with capital and empire are subterranean. A longer text would have been able to give greater voice to these discussions and resulted in a more robust theory of world literature. This is not to say that the book lacks cogency, only that its conceptualization of world literature functions more as an invitation to future work than as a readily applicable theory. Method rules here, so despite the haziness of the theoretical project, Sun’s philological turn offers a path toward clarity.

A nice touch, given Sun’s emphasis on close reading, is the presence of Chinese text (in complex characters) alongside quoted translations. Other languages similarly appear when appropriate, such as when Sun quotes Lu Xun quoting Nietzsche (47). The text is clean, though some errors of date stood out. The book gives 1922 as the year of publication for Lu Xun’s  Call to Arms  (吶喊), 1806 for the Lambs’  Tales , and 1824 for Zhou Zuoren’s essay—the correct dates being 1923, 1807, and 1924, respectively (27; 50; 80), although the first two may refer to the date of manuscript completion rather than publication. The absence of a bibliography is somewhat frustrating, as the endnotes do not make for quick reference. The index helps some by linking names to notes, but not all names are so linked.

These quibbles aside,  On the Horizon of World Literature  offers an exciting methodological challenge to future work on world literature. Moving away from the big picture models popular in recent discourse on the topic, Sun’s development of a translingual approach to close reading favors the recounting of intimate narratives of literary history rather than the search for broad patterns. If her examples are too pat, this may point more to the need to pin down an otherwise nebulous concept of world literature, which she readily acknowledges. Besides, the selected texts are fascinating in themselves—made even more so through Sun’s close readings. Moreover, whereas  Mansfield Park  may not be an exotic text, many of the Chinese selections are unfortunately not well known in English, and Sun does much to rectify that. Even if the book does not solve the problem of world literature, it still offers much for the scholar of literary exchange.

Daniel Dooghan The University of Tampa

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Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century pp 53–67 Cite as

Tagore’s Idea of “World Literature”

• Makarand R. Paranjape 3  
• First Online: 16 December 2014

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Part of the book series: Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures ((SCPT,volume 7))

This essay tries to position Rabindranath Tagore’s little-known essay “Visva–Sahitya” (World Literature) in cross-cultural articulations of such an idea. Considering the circumstances leading to Tagore’s text, it explores the origins of comparatist literary studies in eighteenth century Europe and to colonial context in India. The attempt is to locate Tagore’s ideas of the world literature in the wider circulation of texts across different cultural milieus and the webs of power within which such texts are situated. Though Tagore comes to the world literature only at the end, his essay is an important statement of his view of man, the purpose of human life, and the role of art in its fruition; indeed, we might consider the essay to be a concise formulation of Tagore’s esthetic philosophy itself. What Tagore meant by the world literature was the essential unity of human experience and therefore of human creativity. But more than that, it signified to him the ever-evolving, never-complete edifice of the best and most authentic expression of human creativity, fashioned by so many hands, spread in so many parts of the world, but still part of the one narrative of the human race. He also believed that we reveal ourselves in the literature more profoundly than in mundane activities of self-interest and self-preservation. Moreover, it is only by giving ourselves to others that we can know or express ourselves. Such self-giving is effortless and joyous because in it lies the realization of our own nature. Everywhere, the universe revels in such joyous self-giving which exceeds any functional requirement or necessity. It is this plenitude or surplus that is beautiful and joyous; the artist in his self-giving is thus a part of a fundamental tendency of nature itself. We may call this the surplus value of art theory that Tagore believed in and which he enunciates so eloquently in this essay.

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All quotations from this text refer to the new translation by Rijula Das and Makarand R. Paranjape. Buddhadev Bose’s summary of the same lines in Tagore’s text is as follows: “I have been called upon to discuss a subject to which you have given the English name Comparative Literature. Let me call it World Literature in Bengali” (cited in Sisir Kumar Das 26). An earlier version was published in  Journal of Contemporary Thought special number “Punctuated Renewals: Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century” edited by Debashish Banerji (cited in Paranjape M.R).

These remarks of Spivak’s are available on http://tagore150toronto.ca/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-tagoretribute/ (accessed July 29, 2011).

As a companion piece to this essay, the entire text of Tagore’s speech is provided in a new translation. The essay was published in an English translation in Sukanta Chaudhuri’s edition of Tagore’s Selected Writings on Literature and Language (2001: 138–150). Given its importance, we have tried to offer a new translation of the essay. In our translation, we have, for most part, retained the more accurate rendering of Tagore’s words, which Swapan Chakravorty (Das and Chaudhuri 138–150) has often rendered into more idiomatic English paraphrase. Similarly, we have tried to retain Tagore’s somewhat complicated syntax, rather than simplifying his sentences into “plain” English. We have also avoided gender neutral alterations, translating manush as “man” rather than “human” mostly because such usage was characteristic of Tagore’s times. Tagore almost certainly included the woman in his notion of man, though in specifically speaking of woman in one section of his essay, he acknowledges that much of the other references referred to masculine roles and occupations; at the level of abstraction, then, “man” may be understood as human, but in its practical application, Tagore was quite aware of its gendered implications.

Indeed Albert Schweitzer called Tagore “the Goethe of India” (Kripalani 295).

I owe this insight into Shri Samik Bandyopadhyay who has worked on the 1,450 paintings of Tagore from this period which have never been seen because they were locked up in the vaults of Visva-Bharati, the university that Tagore founded. These paintings show Tagore’s strenuous efforts to liberate himself not only from the tyranny of words but to step out, as he himself desired, out of the khyatiprangan, to liberate himself the arena of fame in which he found himself trapped.

Bose’s translation of the same passage reads as follows:

Now is the time to say the actual thing—that is, we diminish literature by containing it within the constraints of time, nation and individual. If we understand that literature is universal man’s attempt to express himself, then alone can we discern what we ought to within literature. Where the writer has been seen as mediator, there his writing has been limited. Where he has felt the emotions of all mankind, expressed the whole extent of human pain, there his work has attained its place in literature. Then, we must see literature thus—a builder of global standards is engaged upon constructing this temple: writers from many countries and many periods are workers engaged upon this construction site. None of us have the entire plan of the building before us, it is true, but the portions that do not cohere with it are broken and rebuilt again and again; each worker has to work according to his contribution, becomes part of that invisible plan, and it is in this that his genius is expressed-which is why he is not paid the meagre wages of a labourer, but earns the respect of the expert.

( http://www.complitju.org/World%20Literature/WorldLiterature.html ).

Bose’s translation of this passage is as follows:

If we want to understand man as revealed in action, his motivation and his aims, then we must pursue his intentions through the whole of history. To take isolated instances, such as the reign of Akbar or queen Elizabeth, to merely satisfy curiosity. He who knows the Akbar and Elizabeth are only pretexts or occasions; the man, throughout the world of history is incessantly at work to fulfill his deepest purposes, and to unite himself with the All—it is he, I, say, who will strive to see in history not the local and the individual, but the eternal and universal man. His pilgrimage will not end in observing other pilgrims, or he will behold the god whom all pilgrims are seeking. (Cited in Sisir Kumar Das 26)

Interestingly, just over a hundred years later, Salman Rushdie writes The Enchantress of Florence (2008), a novel that links Elizabeth and Akbar in a sort of fictional attempt to unify their then separate worlds.

Ahmad, for instance, says:

The idea of world literature in the traditional sense, a la Goethe, remains deeply canonical, even Arnoldian: all the best that has been thought and written is now to be culled not from this or that nation but from the world. If you think about it, this way of reading “great books” produced in the various continents in the world, assembled in a canonizing way, is perfectly reconcilable with the intensified integration of the upper classes of the world into something resembling a world bourgeoisie. It is very easy for world literature to represent this global integration and arrive at an easy, even very glossy capitalist universalization. In this area, we have to question the very idea of literature and we have to be very suspicious of all texts, certainly including the ones that arrive from the Third World, insofar as they display the slightest potential for canonicity. We have to begin, in fact, with a great suspicion of the very fact that the category of world literature as a pedagogical object is arising in the core capitalist countries, whereas the poorer countries have no means of their own to constitute such objects.

Such remarks reflect a larger mistrust with homogenizing and universalizing projects.

Dev says: “if you want me to define world literature I may say it is the sum total of texts available to me at this moment, translations included. And it is not imperative that we all have the same world literature. As they say in any lucrative offer, terms and conditions apply, here too politics obtain. We shall all be fools of time to say that world literature is one and the same everywhere. If it were so, there would be no need of comparative literature” (12).

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Paranjape, M.R. (2015). Tagore’s Idea of “World Literature”. In: Banerji, D. (eds) Rabindranath Tagore in the 21st Century. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 7. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2038-1_5

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Essays About Literature: Top 6 Examples and 8 Prompts

Society and culture are formed around literature. If you are writing essays about literature, you can use the essay examples and prompts featured in our guide.

It has been said that language holds the key to all human activities, and literature is the expression of language. It teaches new words and phrases, allows us to better our communication skills, and helps us learn more about ourselves.

Whether you are reading poems or novels, we often see parts of ourselves in the characters and themes presented by the authors. Literature gives us ideas and helps us determine what to say, while language gives form and structure to our ideas, helping us convey them.

6 Helpful Essay Examples

1. importance of literature by william anderson, 2. philippine literature by jean hodges, 3. african literature by morris marshall.

• 4.  Nine Questions From Children’s Literature That Every Person Should Answer by Shaunta Grimes

5. Exploring tyranny and power in Macbeth by Tom Davey

6. guide to the classics: homer’s odyssey by jo adetunji, 1. the importance of literature, 2. comparing and contrasting two works of literature  , 3. the use of literary devices, 4. popular adaptations of literature, 5. gender roles in literature, 6. analysis of your chosen literary work, 7. fiction vs. non-fiction, 8. literature as an art form.

“Life before literature was practical and predictable, but in the present-day, literature has expanded into countless libraries and into the minds of many as the gateway for comprehension and curiosity of the human mind and the world around them. Literature is of great importance and is studied upon as it provides the ability to connect human relationships and define what is right and what is wrong.”

Anderson writes about why an understanding of literature is crucial. It allows us to see different perspectives of people from different periods, countries, and cultures: we are given the ability to see the world from an entirely new lens. As a result, we obtain a better judgment of situations. In a world where anything can happen, literature gives us the key to enacting change for ourselves and others. You might also be interested in these essays about Beowulf .

“So successful were the efforts of colonists to blot out the memory of the country’s largely oral past that present-day Filipino writers, artists and journalists are trying to correct this inequity by recognizing the country’s wealth of ethnic traditions and disseminating them in schools through mass media. The rise of nationalistic pride in the 1960s and 1970s also helped bring about this change of attitude among a new breed of Filipinos concerned about the “Filipino identity.””

In her essay, Hodges writes about the history of Philippine literature. Unfortunately, much of Philippine literary history has been obscured by Spanish colonization, as the written works of the Spanish largely replaced the oral tradition of the native Filipinos. A heightened sense of nationalism has recently led to a resurgence in Filipino tradition, including ancient Philippine literature. 

“In fact, the common denominator of the cultures of the African continent is undoubtedly the oral tradition. Writing on black Africa started in the middle Ages with the introduction of the Arabic language and later, in the nineteenth century with introduction of the Latin alphabet. Since 1934, with the birth of the “Negritude.” African authors began to write in French or in English.”

Marshall explores the history of African literature, particularly the languages it was written over time. It was initially written in Arabic and native languages; however, with the “Negritude” movement, writers began composing their works in French or English. This movement allowed African writers to spread their work and gain notoriety. Marshall gives examples of African literature, shedding light on their lyrical content. 

4.   Nine Questions From Children’s Literature That Every Person Should Answer by Shaunta Grimes

“ They asked me questions — questions about who I am, what I value, and where I’m headed — and pushed me to think about the answers. At some point in our lives, we decide we know everything we need to know. We stop asking questions. To remember what’s important, it sometimes helps to return to that place of childlike curiosity and wonder.”

Grimes’ essay is a testament to how much we can learn from literature, even as simple as children’s stories. She explains how different works of children’s literature, such as Charlotte’s Web and Little Women, can inspire us, help us maximize our imagination, and remind us of the fleeting nature of life. Most importantly, however, they remind us that the future is uncertain, and maximizing it is up to us. 

“This is a world where the moral bar has been lowered; a world which ‘sinks beneath the yoke’. In the Macbeths, we see just how terribly the human soul can be corrupted. However, this struggle is played out within other characters too. Perhaps we’re left wondering: in such a dog-eat-dog world, how would we fare?”

The corruption that power can lead to is genuine; Davey explains how this theme is present in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Even after being honored, Macbeth still wishes to be king and commits heinous acts of violence to achieve his goals. Violence is prevalent throughout the play, but Macbeth and Lady Macbeth exemplify the vicious cycle of bloodshed through their ambition and power. 

“Polyphemus is blinded but survives the attack and curses the voyage home of the Ithacans. All of Odysseus’s men are eventually killed, and he alone survives his return home, mostly because of his versatility and cleverness. There is a strong element of the trickster figure about Homer’s Odysseus.”

Adetunji also exposes a notable work of literature, in this case, Homer’s Odyssey . She goes over the epic poem and its historical context and discusses Odysseus’ most important traits: cleverness and courage. As the story progresses, he displays great courage and bravery in his exploits, using his cunning and wit to outsmart his foes. Finally, Adetunji references modern interpretations of the Odyssey in film, literature, and other media.

8 Prompts for Essays About Literature

In your essay, write about the importance of literature; explain why we need to study literature and how it can help us in the future. Then, give examples of literary works that teach important moral lessons as evidence. 

For your essay, choose two works of literature with similar themes. Then, discuss their similarities and differences in plot, theme, and characters. For example, these themes could include death, grief, love and hate, or relationships. You can also discuss which of the two pieces of literature presents your chosen theme better. 

Writers use literary devices to enhance their literary works and emphasize important points. Literary devices include personification, similes, metaphors, and more. You can write about the effectiveness of literary devices and the reasoning behind their usage. Research and give examples of instances where authors use literary devices effectively to enhance their message.  

Literature has been adapted into cinema, television, and other media time and again, with series such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter turning into blockbuster franchises. Explore how these adaptations diverge from their source material yet retain the key themes the writer composed the work with in mind. If this seems confusing, research first and read some essay examples. 

Literature reflects the ideas of the period it is from; for example, ancient Greek literature, such as Antigone, depicts the ideal woman as largely obedient and subservient, to an extent. For your essay, you can write about how gender roles have evolved in literature throughout the years, specifically about women. Be sure to give examples to support your points. 

Choose a work of literature that interests you and analyze it in your essay. You can use your favorite novel, book, or screenplay, explain the key themes and characters and summarize the plot. Analyze the key messages in your chosen piece of literature, and discuss how the themes are enhanced through the author’s writing techniques.

Literature can be divided into two categories: fiction, from the writer’s imagination, and non-fiction, written about actual events. Explore their similarities and differences, and give your opinion on which is better. For a strong argument, provide ample supporting details and cite credible sources.  

Literature is an art form that uses language, so do you believe it is more effective in conveying its message? Write about how literature compares to other art forms such as painting and sculpture; state your argument and defend it adequately. 

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

For help picking your next essay topic, check out the best essay topics about social media .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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Essays on World Literature: Aeschylus • Dante • Shakespeare Paperback – February 20, 2018

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The Man Booker International–winning author of Broken April and The Siege , Albania’s most renowned novelist, and perennial Nobel Prize contender Ismail Kadare explores three giants of world literature―Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare―through the lens of resisting totalitarianism. In isolationist Albania, which suffered under a Communist dictatorship for nearly half a century, classic global literature reached Ismail Kadare across centuries and borders―and set him free. The struggles of Hamlet, Dante, and Aeschylus’s tragic figures gave him an understanding of totalitarianism that shaped his novels. In these incisive critical essays informed by personal experience, Kadare provides powerful evidence that great literature is the enemy of dictatorship and imbues these timeless stories with powerful new meaning. With eloquent prose and the narrative drive of a great mystery novel, Kadare renews our readings of the classics and lends them a distinctly Albanian tint. Like Mark Twain’s Mississippi River, Márquez’s Macondo, and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kadare’s Albania emerges as a microcosm of civilization; here, blood vengeance in mountain communities reaches the dramatic heights of Hamlet’s dilemma, funereal rites take on the air of Greek tragedy, and political repression gives life the feel of Dante’s nine circles of Hell. Like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran , Essays on World Literature casts reading itself as a daring act of resistance to artistic suppression. Kadare’s insights into the Western canon secure his own place within it.

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Restless Books
• Publication date February 20, 2018
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1632061740
• ISBN-13 978-1632061744
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Editorial Reviews

“ Essays on World Literature ― consisting of studies of Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare ― is the more fascinating because of the way Kadare looks at his subjects through the lens of his native land. Having been a backwater for so many centuries, Kadare asserts, Albania is closer to the world of Aeschylus and to the origins of tragedy than any other modern nation."

“Ismail Kadare’s first and only collection of essays translated into English, this time directly from the Albanian originals written between 1985 and 2006, offers profound and highly personal meditations on canonical figures of world literary history…. In his indelibly humanist understanding of art, Kadare conceives of literature―the work of canonically great writers―as art that ‘cries with the world,’ seeking through letters to understand the uniquely and most deeply human: tragedy, violence, pain…. The ‘world’ of Kadare’s three essays on ‘world literature’ is a reflection of Albania’s ‘impossible drama’ on the global scale of human history, an observation at once parochial and profound, like the greatness of great art.”

“The Albanian author and perennial Nobel Prize candidate considers the roots and long influence of Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare, especially in his homeland. Kadare, who won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, discusses the three authors through the filter of totalitarianism, particularly Albania’s oppression under a communist regime and the Kanun, a longtime legal code that effectively endorsed blood feuds…. [A]s windows into his own fiction, [the essays] show that he perceives his favorite themes―among them, oppression, loss, revenge―as part of a through-line that runs back to antiquity. A loose but informed and passionate study of why classic authors endure.”

“Kadare is one of the world’s great novelists: He won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005, the Jerusalem Prize in 2015, and numerous other literary prizes, while his novels have been translated into some forty-five languages…. The collection of three essays in Essays on World Literature prove the worth of a different gaze at figures as time-worn as Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare…. Restless Books is to be commended for having this volume translated (and quite ably so) by an Albanian translator, Ani Kokobobo.”

“Through these three authors―Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare―Kadare tours the history of Western literature, but also gives great insight into what it was like being an intellectual coming of age and finding his own voice in a Communist regime. If you’re looking for something to give you a view onto our world as well as insight into how literature can illuminate it―and how both are interconnected―this is a good book to go with.”

About the Author

Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best known novelist, whose name is mentioned annually in discussions of the Nobel Prize. He won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005; in 2009 he received the Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, Spain’s most prestigious literary award, and in 2015 he won the Jerusalem Prize. In 2016 he was named a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur. James Wood has written of his work, "Kadare is inevitably likened to Orwell and Kundera, but he is a far deeper ironist than the first, and a better storyteller than the second. He is a compellingly ironic storyteller because he so brilliantly summons details that explode with symbolic reality." His last book to be published in English, The Traitor’s Niche, was nominated for the Man Booker International.

A native Albanian, Ani Kokobobo is assistant professor and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas where she teaches Russian literature and culture. Last summer, she published an edited volume: Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle – The Twilight of Realism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has a monograph forthcoming, Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and Gentry Decline (Ohio State University Press, 2017), as well as another edited volume, Beyond Moscow: Reading Russia’s Regional Identities and Initiatives (Routledge, 2017).

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Ani kokobobo.

Ani Kokobobo is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas where she teaches Russian literature and culture. Her articles on nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture have appeared in Tolstoy Studies Journal, Slavic Review, Russian Review, and several collections. Last summer, she published an edited volume: Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle – The Twilight of Realism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). This year, she has a monograph forthcoming, Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and Gentry Decline (Ohio State University Press, 2017), as well as another edited volume, Beyond Moscow: Reading Russia’s Regional Identities and Initiatives (Routledge, 2017). She is presently at work on a project about moral gray zones in Russian and Soviet prison narratives.

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• Importance of Literature: Essay

Literature is the foundation of life . It places an emphasis on many topics from human tragedies to tales of the ever-popular search for love. While it is physically written in words, these words come alive in the imagination of the mind, and its ability to comprehend the complexity or simplicity of the text.

Literature enables people to see through the lenses of others, and sometimes even inanimate objects; therefore, it becomes a looking glass into the world as others view it. It is a journey that is inscribed in pages and powered by the imagination of the reader.

Ultimately, literature has provided a gateway to teach the reader about life experiences from even the saddest stories to the most joyful ones that will touch their hearts.

From a very young age, many are exposed to literature in the most stripped-down form: picture books and simple texts that are mainly for the sole purpose of teaching the alphabet etc. Although these are not nearly as complex as an 800-page sci-fi novel, it is the first step that many take towards the literary world.

Progressively, as people grow older, they explore other genres of books, ones that propel them towards curiosity of the subject, and the overall book.

Reading and being given the keys to the literature world prepares individuals from an early age to discover the true importance of literature: being able to comprehend and understand situations from many perspectives.

Physically speaking, it is impossible to be someone else. It is impossible to switch bodies with another human being, and it is impossible to completely understand the complexity of their world. Literature, as an alternative, is the closest thing the world has to being able to understand another person whole-heartedly.

For stance, a novel about a treacherous war, written from the perspective of a soldier, allows the reader to envision their memories, their pain, and their emotions without actually being that person. Consequently, literature can act as a time machine, enabling individuals to go into a specific time period of the story, into the mind and soul of the protagonist.

With the ability to see the world with a pair of fresh eyes, it triggers the reader to reflect upon their own lives. Reading material that is relatable to the reader may teach them morals and encourage them to practice good judgment.

This can be proven through public school systems, where the books that are emphasized the most tend to have a moral-teaching purpose behind the story.

An example would be William Shakespeare’s stories, where each one is meant to be reflective of human nature – both the good and bad.

Consequently, this can promote better judgment of situations , so the reader does not find themselves in the same circumstances as perhaps those in the fiction world. Henceforth, literature is proven to not only be reflective of life, but it can also be used as a guide for the reader to follow and practice good judgment.

The world today is ever-changing. Never before has life been so chaotic and challenging for all. Life before literature was practical and predictable, but in the present-day, literature has expanded into countless libraries and into the minds of many as the gateway for comprehension and curiosity of the human mind and the world around them.

Literature is of great importance and is studied upon as it provides the ability to connect human relationships and define what is right and what is wrong. Therefore, words are alive more than ever before.

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Author:  William Anderson (Schoolworkhelper Editorial Team)

Tutor and Freelance Writer. Science Teacher and Lover of Essays. Article last reviewed: 2022 | St. Rosemary Institution © 2010-2024 | Creative Commons 4.0

17 Comments

Indeed literature is the foundation of life, people should know and appreciate these kind of things

its very useful info thanks

very helpful…..tnx

Hi, thanks!

First year student who wants to know about literature and how I can develop interest in reading novels.

Fantastic piece!

wonderful work

Literature is anything that is artistically presented through writtings or orally.

you may have tangible wealth untold, caskets of jewels and coffers of gold, richer than i you could never be, i know someone who told stories to me.

there’s a great saying that “the universe isn’t made up of at atoms, its made of stories” i hope none will argue this point, because this is the truest thing i have ever heard and its beautiful…….

I have learnt alot thanks to the topic literature.Literature is everything.It answers the questions why?,how? and what?.To me its my best and I will always treasure and embress literature to death.

I agree with the writer when says that Literature is the foundation of life. For me, reading is the most wonderful experience in life. It allows me to travel to other places and other times. I think that also has learnt me to emphathize with others, and see the world with other´s eyes and from their perspectives. I really like to read.

This is the first time i am presenting on a literature and i am surprised by the amount of people who are interested on the same subject. I regret my absence because i have missed much marvelous thing in that field.In fact literature is what is needed by the whole world,it brings the people of different culture together and by doing so it breaks the imposed barriers that divided people.My address now goes to the people of nowadays who prefer other source of entertainment like TV,i am not saying that TV is bad but reading is better of.COME BACK TO IT THEN.

literature is a mirror; a true reflection of our nature. it helps us see ourselves in a third persons point of view of first persons point of view. it instills virtues and condones vices. literature forms a great portion of fun and entertainment through plays, comedies and novels. it also educates individuals on life’s basic but delicate and sacred issues like love and death. it informs us of the many happenings and events that we would never have otherwise known about. literature also forms a source of livelihood to thousands of people, starting from writers,characters in plays, editors, printers,distributors and business people who deal with printed materials. literature is us and without it, we are void.

I believe that life without Literature would be unacceptable , with it i respect myself and loved human life . Next week i am going to make presentation about Literature, so i benefited from this essay.

Thanks a lot

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