Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Western canon is the body of works considered the best of Western literature, but no fixed list exists. The works included vary according to each critic's opinions on Western culture and the relative importance of its defining characteristics.
Western literature encompasses written works in dozens of European languages, including Albanian, Armenian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, and many others ranging from Basque to Welsh.
The major metaphysical poets included John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert. The term metaphysical was coined by John Dryden, and its meaning was extended during 1779 to describe this group of writers who used wit, conceits, and high intellectual standards to analyze emotion.
The Decamerone is a collection of a hundred stories written by Giovanni Boccaccio, related by a group of men and women who retired to a villa near Florence to escape the plague of 1348. It is significant because Boccaccio used it to give prose the form of elaborated art for the first time in Italian, shaping the development of the novel.
Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926, becoming Italy's first and only woman recipient of the prize. Her works focused on the life, customs, and traditions of the Sardinian people.
Neorealism was an Italian literary movement that developed rapidly between the 1940s and 1950s, drawing on Marxism and wartime experience. Its foundations were laid in the 1920s but suppressed under Fascism; notable authors include Alberto Moravia, Primo Levi, Carlo Levi, and Italo Calvino.