Western literature

• 1. Introduction

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  Western literature stretches across more than a thousand years of European history, encompassing works in dozens of languages from Albanian to Yiddish, from ancient Greek to modern Russian. It is a tradition that has never stood still. Each century brought its own upheavals, and writers absorbed them all: the fall of empires, the rise of new faiths, revolutions in politics and science, and constant argument about what literature was even for.

  The Western canon, as critics call the best of this body of work, has no fixed list. Scholars debate which texts belong and why. But behind that debate lies something more interesting: the way individual writers, in specific places and moments, transformed the language available to them into something no one had seen before. Dante made ancient allegory speak in vernacular Italian. Petrarch turned inward and invented a new kind of lyric self. Boccaccio shaped the novel before anyone called it that.

  The periods that shaped this tradition each had a name and a character. The 16th century gave the world Renaissance literature. The 17th was split between Baroque intensity and Jacobean metaphysics. The 18th became the Enlightenment, a period of military and political advancement that pressed French, Russian, and Spanish writers alike toward reason and reform. The 19th century was the Romantic era, in which political crisis drove writers away from classical form and toward passionate individual expression.

  What follows traces that arc through the writers who bent it, the movements that named it, and the moments when everything changed.

• 2. Latin Roots and Vernacular Beginnings

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  As the Western Roman Empire declined, the Latin tradition did not vanish. Writers including Cassiodorus, Boethius, and Symmachus kept it alive, and the liberal arts flourished at Ravenna under the Gothic king Theodoric. Scholars including Magnus Felix Ennodius, Venantius Fortunatus, and Paulinus of Aquileia maintained the thread.

  The establishment of the medieval universities of Bologna, Padua, Vicenza, Naples, Salerno, Modena, and Parma did more than spread learning. Those institutions prepared the ground in which vernacular literature could take root, because they gathered readers and patrons who wanted something new alongside the classical.

  The earliest vernacular literary tradition in Italy was not in Italian at all. It was in Occitan, spoken in parts of northwest Italy, and it arrived from the south of France. A tradition of vernacular lyric poetry arose in Poitou in the early 12th century and spread south and east, reaching Italy by the end of that same century. These lyric poets were called troubadours, trovatori in Italian.

  The first trovatori to practice in Italy came from elsewhere, but the high aristocracy of northern Italy was ready to patronize them. Among the early patrons were the House of Este, the Da Romano, the House of Savoy, and the Malaspina. Azzo VI of Este hosted a remarkable roster: Aimeric de Belenoi, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Albertet de Sestaro, and Peire Raimon de Tolosa, alongside Rambertino Buvalelli from Bologna, one of the earliest Italian trovatori. Azzo's daughter Beatrice became an object of the poets' courtly love.

  Rambertino was named podesta of Genoa in 1218 and it was probably during his three-year tenure there that Occitan lyric poetry took root in the city. Genoa became the birthplace of a peculiar phenomenon: the podesta-troubadour, men who served multiple cities in political office while writing political poetry in Occitan. Rambertino was the first. The most famous and influential Italian trovatore overall was Sordello, and it was this whole tradition that laid the ground for the Sicilian school of poetry and eventually for Dante himself.

• 3. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio

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  Dante Alighieri wrote La Vita Nuova in 1293, a collection of poems to which he added narration and explanation, idealizing love in a way that transformed Beatrice from a real person into a symbol of the divine. Everything in the work is, as the source puts it, sensual, aerial, and heavenly.

  The Divine Comedy pushed further. It sends the poet through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in the company of the Latin poet Virgil, and under its literal story lies an allegorical one: mankind aiming at both temporal and eternal happiness. The forest where the poet loses himself represents sin. The mountain lit by the sun represents universal monarchy. Envy is Florence; Pride is the house of France; Avarice is the papal court. Virgil stands for reason and empire. Beatrice stands for the supernatural aid that mankind requires to reach God. The work ranks among the finest in world literature, taking its materials from theology, philosophy, history, and mythology, but above all from Dante's own passions.

  Petrarch was the first humanist, and also the first modern lyric poet. His career was long and turbulent. He lived for many years at Avignon, cursing the corruption of the papal court, and he traveled through nearly all of Europe, corresponding with emperors and popes. Where Dante's lyrics had been transcendental, Petrarch stayed entirely within human limits. He was a psychological poet who examined every feeling with an art of exquisite sweetness. His Canzoniere includes political poems addressed to Cola di Rienzi and several sonnets against the court of Avignon, remarkable for their vigor and for showing a sense of Italian consciousness broader than Dante's.

  Giovanni Boccaccio shared Petrarch's love of antiquity. He was the first to assemble a Latin translation of the Iliad, and in 1375 the Odyssey. His De genealogia deorum became an encyclopedia of mythological knowledge and a precursor of the humanist movement of the 15th century. He was also the first historian of women in his De mulieribus claris. Most famously, he wrote the Decamerone, a collection of a hundred stories related by a group of men and women who retreated to a villa near Florence to escape the plague of 1348. In the Decamerone, prose first took the form of elaborated art in Italian, and novel writing, which had been abundant in preceding centuries especially in France, finally assumed an artistic shape.

• 4. Humanism and the Medici

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  Renaissance humanism developed during the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries as a response to medieval scholastic education, which had focused on preparing men to be doctors, lawyers, or theologians. Humanists sought instead to create citizens able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity, accomplishing this through the studia humanitatis: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. The main centers of humanism were Florence and Naples.

  Early humanists such as Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, and Leonardo Bruni were great collectors of antique manuscripts. By the mid-15th century, many of the upper classes had received humanist educations. There were five humanist popes in the 15th century; one of them, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, who became Pius II, was a prolific author who wrote a treatise on the education of boys.

  In Florence, the influence of the Medici family shaped literature from 1430 to 1492. Lorenzo de' Medici gave his poetry the colors of both pronounced realism and lofty idealism, moving between the Platonic sonnet and the passionate triplets of the Amori di Venere, between the grandiosityof the Salve and the earthiness of Nencia and Beoni. Next to Lorenzo came Poliziano, a great Greek scholar who united the ancient and the modern with greater art still, his Italian verses dazzling with the elegance of Greek sources whether in the Orfeo or the Stanze per la giostra.

  A completely new poetic form arose in this Florentine context: the Canto carnascialesco, a type of choral song accompanied by symbolic masquerades common in Florence at carnival time. These songs were put into the mouth of workmen and tradesmen singing the praises of their craft. Large companies rode on horseback through Florence in the evenings, playing and singing. Lorenzo himself directed these triumphs and wrote some of the songs; the one called Bacco ed Arianna became the most famous.

• 5. Reformation, Baroque, and Metaphysical Wit

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  In 16th-century England, the Reformation generated a Protestant aesthetic, drawing poets away from Rome and toward the Gospel of Saint John. A group emerged known as the revelatory poetics, which included John Donne, George Herbert, and Thomas Traherne. Author Paul Cefalu traces this high Christology to Donne's own claim that the Gospel of Saint John "containes all Divinity". Forms that shaped the era included the Spenserian stanza, the fourteen-line sonnet, and the pastoral mode. Edmund Spenser was so central to the pastoral genre that he was dubbed the English Virgil. Significant texts of the period include The Great Bible, edited by Myles Coverdale, and the first Book of Common Prayer, published on the 15th of January 1549 after acceptance by the House of Lords; its author, Thomas Cranmer, helped create a standard version of modern English.

  In Italy, the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 ushered in centuries of foreign domination, and a new school arose called the Secentismo. Its leading figure was Giambattista Marino, known especially for his epic poem L'Adone. Marino wished to surprise and shock readers through the marvellous and the unusual, deploying far-fetched metaphors that created a friction between apparently disparate things. His followers mixed tradition and innovation: working with existing forms including the sonnet, the sestina, the canzone, and the madrigal, while developing new structures. The debate over Marinism versus classical purity was not resolved until the founding of the Accademia dell'Arcadia by Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni and Gian Vincenzo Gravina in 1690.

  In England, the Jacobean period gave birth to the metaphysical poets. The term metaphysical was coined by John Dryden, and during 1779 its meaning was extended to describe a group including Donne, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert. These poets used wit and high intellectual standards while drawing from nature to reveal insights about emotion. John Donne's famous conceit in "The Flea" uses the insect to describe the inseparable bond between the poet and his lover, arguing that as multiple bloods mingle within one flea, their connection cannot be divided.

• 6. Enlightenment and Its Discontents

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  The Enlightenment spanned the 18th century across many western countries, and recent scholarship has split it into two degrees of progression: a moderate form, which Henry Farnham described in The Enlightenment in America as preaching balance, order, and religious compromise, and a Revolutionary Enlightenment that attempted to construct a new heaven and earth out of the destruction of the old.

  In the Netherlands, Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was published anonymously in Amsterdam. It rejected the Jewish and Christian religions for their lack of philosophical depth and was considered so exclusive in its appeal that Spinoza argued it was only understood by elitists. Theologian Lambert van Valthuysen was among those who publicly rejected its views.

  In Italy, Giambattista Vico investigated in his Scienza nuova the laws governing the progress of the human race and tried to infer the universal laws of history from a psychological study of mankind. Cesare Beccaria's Trattato dei delitti e delle pene made a contribution to penal reform and promoted the abolition of torture. Carlo Goldoni overcame the old popular form of comedy with its pantalone and harlequin masks, creating comedy of character following Moliere's example. His best-known work, Servant of Two Masters, has been translated and adapted internationally numerous times.

  In Spain, the War of Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1714 brought French control over the country and reshaped its literary culture. English authors including John Locke, Edmund Burke, Edward Young, and Thomas Hobbes held influence over Spanish Ilustrados. Poets Ignacio de Luzán Claramunt and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos contributed greatly to the neoclassical movement. Women also gained a larger voice: Margarita Hickey, Frasquita Larrea, and Maria Gertrudis Hore were among those who published during the Spanish Enlightenment.

  Italy's most important literary event of the century was the appearance of the tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, who worshipped Greek and Roman popular liberty and made his ancient characters speak like revolutionists of his time. Ugo Foscolo, inspired by Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, wrote the Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, a love story mixed with patriotic protest against the Treaty of Campo Formio. His poem the Sepolcri is considered his finest work, and the men who made the revolution of 1848 were brought up on his writing.

• 7. Romanticism and Its Rebels

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  The Romantic era reached its pinnacle during the 19th century. In Italy, the romantic school found its organ in the Conciliatore, established in 1818 at Milan, with contributors including Silvio Pellico, Alessandro Manzoni, and Giovanni Berchet. But Italian Romanticism was a contested label. Writers including Leopardi and Manzoni detested being grouped into any category. Gina Martegiani argued in her 1908 essay "Il Romanticismo Italiano Non Esiste" that writers who called themselves Romantics produced only two-dimensional imitations of German Romantic authors.

  The great poet of the Italian Romantic age was Giacomo Leopardi. His Operette Morali, dialogues marked by what the source describes as a cold and bitter smile at human destinies, united clarity of style with depth of conception. He has been called not only the greatest lyrical poet since Dante but also one of the most perfect prose writers in the Italian tradition, and he is widely seen as one of the most radical thinkers of the 19th century.

  In Britain, the French Revolution was the key catalyst. William Blake used philosophical and biblical themes; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, known as the Lake Poets, wrote the Lyrical Ballads, claimed to have marked the beginning of the Romantic Movement. A second wave followed, more aggressive: George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Byron's advocacy for an anti-violence revolution gave birth to the Byronic hero, a rebellious fictional character who pervades much of his work and who many saw as a reflection of Byron himself. British Romanticism was also shaped by exposure to Italian Renaissance art: British artists who had resided in Italy during Bonaparte's invasion sold paintings by Michelangelo and Raphael to London clients, and those works shaped the aesthetic of writers including Mary Shelley. English essayist William Hazlitt articulated how the artistic liberty visible in Raphael's paintings inspired Romantic-era poets.

• 8. Modern Movements and Nobel Voices

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  After the Risorgimento, Italian literature scattered into competing movements. The Scapigliatura sought to rejuvenate Italian culture through the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. The Verismo movement was led by Luigi Capuana and most notably Giovanni Verga; Capuana's novel Giacinta is generally regarded as the manifesto of Italian verismo. Decadentism followed, led by Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Pascoli (best known for his Myricae and Poemetti), and Gabriele D'Annunzio, who produced original work in poetry, drama, and fiction of extraordinary range.

  Grazia Deledda, who focused on the life, customs, and traditions of the Sardinian people, was awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming Italy's first and only woman Nobel laureate in that field. Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature, explored the shifting nature of reality in plays including Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author), first performed in 1921.

  Neorealism developed rapidly between the 1940s and the 1950s, but its roots were suppressed under Fascism. Alberto Moravia had difficulty finding a publisher for Gli indifferenti (1929); Carlo Bernari's Tre operai (1934) was unofficially banned by Mussolini; Ignazio Silone published Fontamara (1933) in exile; Elio Vittorini was imprisoned after publishing Conversazione in Sicilia (1941). After the fall of Fascism, the movement flourished. Primo Levi documented his experiences at Auschwitz in If This Is a Man (1947). Carlo Levi reflected political exile in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1951). Italo Calvino ventured into fantasy in the trilogy I nostri antenati (1952-1959) and into postmodernism with Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979).

  Italy's children's literature runs deep as well. In 1634, the Pentamerone became the first major published collection of European folk tales and contained the first literary European version of Cinderella. Its author, Giambattista Basile, created the oldest recorded forms of many well-known fairy tales. In 1883, Carlo Collodi wrote The Adventures of Pinocchio, the first Italian fantasy novel, and in that same year Emilio Salgari published the first Sandokan adventure, beginning a career that would make him the adventure writer par excellence for young readers in Italy. Umberto Eco's Medieval detective story Il nome della rosa appeared in 1980 and brought Italian literature to an international audience that stretched well beyond the academy.