Ministry of higher and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №1 Course paper Theme: Early black poetry Phyllis Wheatley

CHAPTER.II. Early black poetry: Phillis Wheatley.
2.1. Western literature, Ancient literature and Medieval literature
From antiquity to the present, Western literature includes the history of literatures in the Indo-European family of languages and a select few other languages whose cultures came to be intimately linked with the West. Despite their diversity, European literatures and languages have a common heritage. The Indo-European language family includes the following languages: Greek, Latin, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, Celtic, and Romance. (Finnish, Hungarian, and eastern Mediterranean Semitic languages like Hebrew are not Indo-European. However, these languages' literatures are frequently incorporated into and intimately related to the canonical Western literatures.) The majority of the shared literary heritage comes from ancient Greece and Rome. Christianity helped to maintain, transform, and spread it, which is how it made its way into the vernacular languages of the Western Hemisphere, the European Continent, and other places where Europeans had colonized. The main characteristics of this body of work still exhibit a cohesiveness that distinguishes it from the rest of the world's literatures. These typical traits are taken into account here. See entries on American literature, English literature, German literature, Greek literature, Latin American literature, and Scandinavian literature for details about the major national literatures or literary traditions of the West. There are also separate articles for a number of additional Western literary genres, such as those written in the Armenian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Romanian languages.
The unfortunate reality of ancient Western literature is that the majority of it has been lost. Before it could be preserved in writing, some of it had already been forgotten; the majority of the remainder has been destroyed by fire, battle, and the passage of time; and the occasional restorations made by archaeologists and paleographers are modest. However, there are still some Greek and a lot more Latin literature that have survived that demonstrate the heights of the ancient world's creative imagination and intellect.. Each of the five ancient civilizations—Babylon and Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Israelite culture in Palestine—met at least one of the others. Although Assyro-Babylonia produced the first complete code of laws and two epics of archetypal myth that were repeated and echoed in far-off lands, and Egypt produced the mystical intuition of a supernatural world that captured the imagination of the Greeks and Romans, the two most ancient, Assyro-Babylonia and Egypt, with their broken clay tablets and rotted papyrus rolls, make no direct literary signal to the modern age.. Because the early writings of the Hebrew culture served as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, Hebrew culture had the greatest literary influence on the West. This literature profoundly influenced Western consciousness through translation starting around the time of St. Augustine onward into every vernacular language as well as into Latin. Judaism had previously been distinguished from the Greek and Roman world by its intense religiosity. Greek literature has no clear literary ancestry and seems to have arisen on its own, although being affected by the religious stories of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Egypt. Roman authors often borrowed subjects, approaches, even meter and rhyme schemes from Greek precept.. The "classical" tradition continued after Rome passed the torch to the early Middle Ages, by which time Greek had been absorbed into a purely Latin tradition and was only rediscovered in its own right at the Renaissance. The "classical" tradition later became a threat to natural literary development, particularly when some critics in the 17th century started to insist that the topics and style of contemporary writing should conform with those used by Greece and Rome. The Greeks and Romans created all of the major literary genres, including epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric, satire, history, biography, and prose narrative. Subsequent creations have mainly been auxiliary extensions of these genres.. The Latin of Virgil was modeled after the Greek epic of Homer; Catullus and Ovid echoed the lyric fragments of Alcaeus and Sappho; Livy and Tacitus succeeded Thucydides as historians; but neither the tragedy of the great Athenians of the 5th century BC nor the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle found a worthy counterpart in Roman Seneca because the practical Romans were not philosophers. The Romans had an extremely specific vision and, as their art of portraiture indicates, were profoundly interested in human individuality, in contrast to Greek writers who excelled at abstraction. In conclusion, the writings of these authors, as well as those of others, but probably especially those by Greek writers, embody the creative and moral nature of Western man. It has aided in shaping his values and passing down a custom to future generations. The tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles are a sublime expression of man's breakthrough into moral awareness of his situation, while the epics of Homer extend their concern from the proper treatment of strangers to behavior in situations of deep involvement among rival heroes, their enemies, and the overseeing gods. Numerous Roman writers, including Naevius, Ennius, and Cato, as well as Virgil, Horace, and Seneca, shared an elevated kind of stoicism that placed an emphasis on duty.. As in the logical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, a human ideal may be recognized in Juvenal's vicious satire and Anacreon's songs of love and wine. "Wonders are many, but none is more wonderful than man, the might that traverses the white sea," proclaims a chorus of Sophocles. Before the ancient world came to an end, the spiritual ideal of Judeo-Christianity, whose authors foreshadowed medieval literature, was to be turned into the human ideal held up in Greek and Latin literature, developed after civilization had evolved from earlier millennia of savagery. In this context, the term "medieval," which means "belonging to the Middle Ages," refers to the literature of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean from as early as the founding of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire around AD 300 for medieval Greek, from the time after the fall of Rome in 476 for medieval Latin, and from the Carolingian Renaissance Charlemagne fostered in France (around 800) to the end of the 15th century for the majority of written vernacular literature.
Since Christianity had spread throughout the former Roman Empire's realms, Europe had access to and instruction in the early Church Fathers' methodical approach to life, literature, and religion. The medieval practice of viewing life symbolically was founded in the West on the confluence of Christian and classical thought. The eternal and consistent order of the Greek universe was given Christian form, and nature became sacramental—a symbolic revelation of spiritual truth—through St. Augustine. Classical literature was infused with the same symbolism, and exegetical, or interpretive, techniques that were initially used with the Bible were broadly used to both classical and secular books. Dante's allegorical conception of himself and his journey in The Divine Comedy belongs to the same lineage as the allegorical or symbolic approach that found in Virgil a pre-Christian prophet and in the Aeneid a tale of the soul's journey through life to heaven (Rome). The church not only defined literature's function but also ensured its preservation. Other monastic centers of learning were founded after St. Benedict's monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy was founded in 529, especially following the Gothic and Irish missions up the Danube and to the Rhine in the sixth and seventh centuries. When Goths, Vandals, Franks, and later Norsemen successively ravaged Europe, these monasteries were able to preserve the sole classical literature accessible in the West. For the most of the time, works in the vernacular were subordinate to the classical Latin authors who had been preserved and the Latin works that were still being written.. The majority of significant works in the disciplines of philosophy, theology, history, and science were written in Latin, as were St. Augustine's City of God, the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History, and the Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus, for example.