Western literature includes a large body of literature from ancient Greece and Rome to the present day in Indo-European languages. It exhibits unity in themes and construction and is often studied in smaller groups. The Western literary canon includes over 3,000 works considered essential reading, such as Beowulf, the Odyssey, Hamlet, Ulysses, and War and Peace. The concept of Western literature is sometimes confused with the Western genre of fiction set in the American West.
“Western literature” is a broad term referring to a large body of literature from antiquity to the present day in the Indo-European language family – including English, Spanish, French, Italian and Russian – whose common literary heritage originates in the ancient Greece and Rome. In addition to Greek and Latin, the languages of the Western literary tradition include the Romance and Germanic languages, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, and a small group of other languages whose cultures have been closely associated with the West. The literary heritage of ancient Greece and Rome has been preserved and transformed by the spread of Christianity. Transmitted first throughout the European continent, this Greco-Roman literary tradition spread to the Western Hemisphere and other regions that were settled by Europeans. Western literature exhibits a unity in its themes and construction that distinguishes it from literature elsewhere in the world.
“Literature” is a broad term in itself, but at its most basic it means the collected writings of a particular group, especially works in the major genres: epic, drama, lyric, novel, and so on. Western literature encompasses such a large body of work that it is often studied in smaller groups, such as in terms of specific genres, time periods, literary movements, or cultures. Examples of areas of study might include epics, medieval literature, 18th century literature, romanticism, and American literature.
The Western literary canon is a group of more than 3,000 works of literature that have been determined by experts and academics to be the “great works” of Western literature. That is, these works have stood the test of time and are generally considered essential reading within the body of literature. The canonical classification is controversial not so much for what it includes but for what it excludes, such as the great works of ethnic literature.
Certain works, however, are rarely contested as cornerstones of the literary canon. Beowulf, Homer’s Odyssey, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example, are almost universally considered great works of Western literature. Other standard works in the Western literary tradition would invariably include works by Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, Aristotle, and Miguel de Cervantes, among others.
The concept of western literature is sometimes confused with the western, a genre of fiction – usually in the form of a short story or novel – set in the frontier of the American West. Westerns often feature cowboys, scouts, lawmen, and American Indians in the adventurous 19th-century “Wild West.” While Westerns have enjoyed popularity and mass consumption, with few exceptions, they have not joined the ranks of canonical Western literature.
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