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Greek Mythology
Greek Mythology, beliefs and ritual observances
of the ancient Greeks, who became the first Western civilization
about 2000 BC. It consists mainly of a body of diverse stories
and legends about a variety of gods. Greek mythology had become
fully developed by about the 700s BC. Three classic collections
of myths¡ªTheogony by the poet Hesiod and the Iliad
and the Odyssey by the poet Homer¡ªappeared at about
that time. Greek mythology has several distinguishing characteristics.
The Greek gods resembled humans in form and showed human feelings.
Unlike ancient religions such as Hinduism or Judaism, Greek
mythology did not involve special revelations or spiritual teachings.
It also varied widely in practice and belief, with no formal
structure, such as a church government, and no written code,
such as a sacred book.
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Bible
Bible, also called the Holy Bible, the sacred
book or Scriptures of Judaism and of Christianity. The Bible
of Judaism and the Bible of Christianity are different, however,
in some important ways. The Jewish Bible is the Hebrew Scriptures,
39 books originally written in Hebrew, except for a few sections
in Aramaic. The Christian Bible is in two parts, the Old Testament
and the 27 books of the New Testament. The Old Testament is
structured in two slightly different forms by the two principal
divisions of Christendom. The version of the Old Testament used
by Roman Catholics is the Bible of Judaism plus 7 other books
and additions to books (see the accompanying table); some of
the additional books were originally written in Greek, as was
the New Testament. The version of the Old Testament used by
Protestants is limited to the 39 books of the Jewish Bible.
The other books and additions to books are called the Apocrypha
by Protestants; they are generally referred to as deuterocanonical
books by Roman Catholics.
The term Bible is derived through Latin from
the Greek biblia, or "books," the diminutive form of byblos,
the word for "papyrus" or "paper," which was exported from the
ancient Phoenician port city of Biblos. By the time of the Middle
Ages the books of the Bible were considered a unified entity.
More......
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English Literature
International group of literatures using the
English language. The oldest of these, in England itself--and
in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but commonly referred to as
'English Literature'--pre-dates the modern form of the English
language. Before the first printed books in English (1475),
the outstanding literary achievement is the poetry of Chaucer.
With print came the influences of the European Renaissance,
especially of Petrarch, who inspired a succession of courtly
English poets from Wyatt and Surrey to Sidney and Spenser. The
crowning achievements of the English Renaissance, though, are
the works of the poet-playwrights working in London between
the 1580s and the 1630s, led by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson,
and Webster. After the phase of Restoration comedy, English
drama went into decline until the end of the 19th century. The
17th century saw the flourishing of the metaphysical poets,
and the composition by Milton of the greatest epic poem in English,
Paradise Lost. In the century from 1660, poetry was dominated
by elegant satire in the work of Dryden, Pope, and Johnson,
while the prose satires of Swift and the more realistic narratives
of Defoe prepared the way for the new tradition of the novel
in English--of which the early masters were Fielding, Richardson,
and Sterne. From the end of the 18th century, a major revival
of poetry was seen both in the work of the Scottish poet Burns
and in the English exponents of Romanticism: Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Blake, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Apart from Tennyson, the later
19th-century poets are relatively minor figures, but the tradition
of the 19th-century novel is exceptionally strong, from Austen
and Scott in the early decades, through Dickens and the Bronte
sisters to George Eliot and Hardy in later years. The revival
of drama from the 1890s was led by Irish writers (Wilde, Shaw)
and continued through the Irish Literary Renaissance, which
also produced the outstanding poet (Yeats) and novelist (Joyce)
of the early 20th century. Apart from Woolf and Lawrence, the
literary Modernism of this period in Britain was dominated by
writers from overseas: Conrad from Poland, James, Pound, and
T. S. Eliot from the US. Since the work of the poet Auden and
the novelist Orwell in the 1930s and 1940s, literature in Britain
itself has subsided into a relatively undistinguished phase,
eclipsed by Irish writers (Beckett, Heaney) and by the vitality
of other English-language literatures.
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American Literature
The most solidly established tradition outside
the British Isles is that of American literature in English.
At first subservient to British models even after its political
independence in 1776, the US produced in the mid-19th century
a literature distinctively its own in the fictions of Cooper,
Poe, Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville, and in the essays of Emerson;
while the most original poets of this period--Whitman and Dickinson--broke
sharply away from British influence. Later in the 19th century
the colloquial humour of Twain contrasted strongly with the
Briticized manner of James--who settled in England, starting
an important line of expatriate US Modernist writers in Europe
(notably Pound, T. S. Eliot, Stein, and Hemingway). Other early
20th-century writers such as Faulkner and Stevens conducted
their modernizing experiments on native soil, where American
drama also matured with the work of O'Neill, Tennessee Williams,
and Arthur Miller. Notable post-war poets have included Ginsberg,
Plath, and Robert Lowell, while the novel and short story have
continued to flourish in the hands of Salinger, Vonnegut, O'Connor,
Pynchon, Roth, Updike and an emergent generation of black women
writers including Walker and Toni Morrison.
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¡¬Greek Mythology¡¬Bible¡¬ENGLISH
HISTORY¡¬ENGLISH LITERATURE¡¬ENGLISH
AUTHORS AND WORKS¡¬AMERICAN
HISTORY¡¬AMERICAN
LITERATURE¡¬AMERICAN AUTHORS
AND WORKS¡¬
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