Classics of world literature: defining the indefinable

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

"How the classics teach", "I'll go read the classics" - these turns can be heard in everyday speech. However, it is unlikely that we are fully aware of which writers have the right to be included in the golden fund of belles-lettres, and what this phenomenon is in general - a classic of world literature. This article will answer such questions.

Terminology issues

It is quite difficult to outline the concept of classical, because this definition is used in a variety of meanings. For an ordinary native speaker, it is akin to an ideal, a standard, something to strive for. However, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, in relation to literature, the scope of these parameters is mobile and varies depending on a particular era. So, for Corneille and Racine, the classics of world literature are primarily works of the times of Antiquity, while the Middle Ages did not welcome them at all. And at the beginning of the 19th century, there were even lovers to assert that all the best in Russia had already been written. Agree: fans of Pushkin, Dostoevskyand Tolstoy, such hypotheses seem extremely ridiculous.

Different point of view

Also, "classical literature" is sometimes understood as works that were created before modernism. Although now such a view can be considered somewhat outdated, since the novels of Kafka, Joyce and Proust, the canvases of Dali and Malevich have long passed into the category of the golden fund of art, weeding out less talented contemporaries.

At the same time, despite historical modifications, the classics of world literature remain timeless, universal and talented. Even after hundreds of years, humanity turns to the works of Shakespeare, Goethe or Pushkin, interpreting them in various discourses. This is made possible by the depth of their content, relevance to one and all.

So, to summarize: what does classical literature include? Classic books whose works are still read today.

Classical and "high" literature are the same thing?

The division of literature into three "floors" - high, fiction and mass - appeared relatively recently. More precisely, when entertaining books began to be created specifically for the average reader. The classics of world literature in many respects corresponds to the "high" works. They are intellectual, require considerable work on the part of the reader, his experience. However, the term "classical" is also applied to samples of the so-called popular literature, though in a slightly different meaning. An example of this would bedetectives by Agatha Christie and fantasy by Tolkien. When their fans claim that this is a classic of world literature, they mean that "Ten Little Indians" or "The Lord of the Rings" served as a successful model for subsequent writers who worked within these genres. It is difficult to judge to what extent the named works will remain in the memory of readers, literary criticism does not give an exact answer to this question.

List of world classics

It has become traditional to rank books that are required reading for those who want to be considered a truly educated person. Open such lists of creations of ancient Greek and Roman authors: Homer ("Iliad"), Aeschylus ("Prometheus chained") and Virgil ("Aeneid"). These works have the unconditional right to bear the honorary title of "classic of world literature". The era of the Middle Ages became the cradle of the work of J. Chaucer and F. Villon, as well as an infinite number of literary monuments that do not have an author.

The Renaissance gave us the creators of eternal images - Shakespeare and Cervantes. However, one must also remember about Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lope de Vega, Francois Rabelais and some others. The 17th century was marked by baroque (Pedro Calderon, Gongora) and classic (Racine, Corneille, Molière) art. Then came the Age of Enlightenment, enriching literature with the names of Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe and Schiller.

The 19th century opens the romantic work of Byron, Scott, Hoffmann, Hugo, Poe. Somewhere in the middle of the century, romanticism is replaced by critical realism and novelsStendhal, Balzac, Dickens.

The turn of the century is distinguished by the emergence of the first modernist movements - symbolism (Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde), naturalism (Zola) and impressionism (Knut Hamsun). At the same time, the so-called new drama (Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck) was gaining popularity, striving to completely rethink the outdated dramatic techniques. The twentieth century enriched literature with the modernist novel (mentioned by Kafka, Proust and Joyce), a large number of avant-garde movements - surrealism, dadaism, expressionism. The second half of the last century was marked by the work of Brecht, Camus, Hemingway and Marquez. You can also talk about modern postmodern works that have become classics (Pavic, Suskind).

Russian classic writers

Russian classics is, of course, a separate conversation. The XIX and XX centuries discovered the names of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Fet, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Blok, Gorky, Yesenin, Bulgakov, Sholokhov… Classics of Russian and world literature are formed from their works.