What is Literature? The most basic definition of literature is that it is the written records of a people. Such a broad definition includes legal and business records that have survived until today. Even though an accountant’s log book from the Middle Ages may fulfill this very basic definition, most people prefer a narrower definition of literature in which the piece of writing chosen has artistic merit and reflects the values and ideals of the people who wrote it.
Literature came into existence shortly after the creation of civilization and writing systems. Every culture has produced classic works that have stood the test of time. Whether this be the Bible produced by the Ancient Hebrews, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Greece’s Homer, or the plays of England’s Shakespeare, dubbed the bard, literature tells something about a people and it culture.
English Literature, like all other forms of literature, helps a person understand the cultures that produced it and how the language itself has developed over time. Few English speaking people today would understand or recognize the Old English of Beowulf. Modern speakers would have difficulty understanding the original text of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and even Shakespeare’s plays have needed modern language editions. Later authors, such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, can be read by modern speakers without the need for such interpretations, but even know the language seems quaint. Terry Pratchett, a modern satirist will likely to be remembered long beyond his death, but Discworld books and their memorable characters are still too new to be considered literature.
English Literature Helps Us Trace the Development of the Language. The language brought by the Heathen invaders Great Britain after the fall of Rome bears little resemblance to the form the language takes to day. The most accurate way to trace the development of the language is through translations of the Bible from the middle Ages to the Present. Although the earliest translations resulted in the execution of the person responsible by the Roman Catholic Church, copies of this holy text still survive. Translations of the Bible produced after the publication of the version that King James commissioned show further development since the time of Shakespeare. More modern usage in Bible translation printed after the King James version show the Modern English has developed, even if the language has been “dumbed down” from the original translation so more people can understand the text.
Good Literature Should Be a Thing of Beauty. The King James Version, despite its many translation mistakes, survived because it shows what the English language is capable of in the hands of skilled writers, as do the plays of William Shakespeare. Tolkien and Dickens are pleasing to the ear when their books are read aloud. While lyrical language is not required to make good literature, and authors such as George Orwell are considered to be literary despite not having the same gifts as many of his predecessors, become literature for another reason – they make a moral point.
Literature Makes a Moral Point. Rather than phrasing it as a moral point, it should be said that good literature has a moral. The former wording may leave the reader thinking that the moral must be religious in nature for a story to be good literature. Many good works of literature criticize prevailing social mores and such authors make an attempt to point out what the feel people should be doing in their texts. This does not mean that the reader has to agree with the author’s point, but that a moral should be present in all good literature.
English Literature Serves as a Cultural Yardstick. Not only does literature allow us to trace the changes to the language since the time of the British invasion by the Angles and Saxons shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire, the course English literature has taken through the centuries allows us to see how the cultures and values of people have changed. The humorless people who first wrote down Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon riddles are a far cry from the culture that produced bawdy tales of Chaucer and the many puns that occur in Shakespeare’s plays. Furthermore, by comparing the works of English authors to other English-speaking authors that other countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, show how their cultures diverged from the small island that many of their ancestors came from.
Literature Takes Us to Other Worlds. Even if the world of the author creates vaguely resembles our own and contains many of the same problems, the author’s world is not the same one in which we live. Escapism may have once been a dirty word to some, but that perception has since changed. Taking the time to get lost in the works of good authors gives us time to think about our own problems, or in some cases, how the problems of the heroes and villains in works of fiction seem so similar to our own. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia may seem nothing like our own, but the trials and triumphs of the hero have served to inspire generations of children around the world and will likely become a successful movie franchise, as have the works of his friend, English author and linguistics professor, J.R.R. Tolkien.
English literature has a long history. Beowulf, and the King Arthur tales may have been written down far after the original German tribes invaded England, but they tell us something about the peoples that produced them. Whether we follow Beowulf’s life, fight for the ideal kingdom of King Arthur, where justice and truth prevail, thrill to the powers of logic employed by Sherlock Holmes, or are terrified by the dystopian futures of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, we learn something about the people who lived during the times when these tales were written from reading their works. It may not be the same details that are most interesting to the archaeologist or historian, but they are the details that show us what people thought about how to live that was important enough to tell us through the written word.
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