The journey of literature is as old as life itself since humanity evolved with storytelling and till today, continues with it. Over the years, forms of storytelling have been evolved but the primary objective of storytelling remains the same – to entertain or to convey a message. If one were to imagine, the birth of literature probably took place beside a fireplace when humans made a fire to not only protect themselves but also to share stories.
The content of these stories would vary depending on many factors. Some were imaginations, some were facts and others were a recollection of daily activities. Some stories were lost, others are forgotten and many were modified as they were passed down generation after other. Some became history, others legends, and a few answered mysteries of the universe.
While there is no proof of when and why the written form of storytelling evolved, many theories point out that the necessity for written communication evolved when the traders wanted to record their transactions or tally goods and their quantities. Excavations at Ugarit in Syria suggest that clay tablets existed around 2100 – 1200 BC. Soon after, writing took up another function – to record and preserve oral histories which were essential for people at that time for their culture and served their necessities. This led to preserving of many stories in different parts of the world and that is the only possible theory of how literature was born.
Literature is defined as anything that is written although, in 2022, we see this word often being associated with drama, fiction, art, and other restricted forms. The earliest human record of written history was about 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia where the stories of The Epic of Gilgamesh were written. Some arguments present that the writings in the Pyramid of Giza were the most ancient. In any case, these were carved on stones.
The Mahabharata written in the Indian subcontinent is considered to be the most ancient form of literature which originated in India. Its enormous length makes it the longest poem in the world even today with over 200,000 verses. With about 1.8 million words, it is 10 times bigger than Odyssey and The Illiad combined. It was started around the 3rd century and completed around the early 4th century. Sage Vyasa is the writer of this grand epic which describes a war between two families and ways to achieve goals of life. It illustrates living life amidst various challenges that life presents by the various characters in it.
While The Mahabharata was a poem, the Ramayana is a Sanskrit epic that has about 24,000 verses and is one of the largest of the world epics. It was written from the 7th century BCE to the 3rd century CE. These two epics are considered as the cornerstone of world literature by many and to this day, have influenced numerous people around the world for generations.
Many of the early texts were religious including Ramayana and Mahabharata and others that followed by The Holy Quran, The Bible, etc. Greek drama was the first one that used narratives ballad format. It also introduced the characters in their voices. The distinct categorization of tragedy and comedy is still being used today.
Moving towards the east. we get One thousand and one night from Baghdad. This is another ancient book that tells us a story distinctive unique. There is a primary frame story within which there are one thousand stories told. These stories were capturing and provided moral to the listener or the reader.
Drama and literature continued to evolve by the end of the 18th century after which novelization had become a primary source of expression for most writers. Artists started to resort and adapt to a style of writing. This united many authors and separated them by style, or location, or even their writing technique. The stories started to be driven more by the emotions of idiosyncratic protagonists and this was called as Romantic movement in literature. In England, the poets used the power of nature in their works to heal the human soul. Such themes became more and more common in The New England Transcendentalists and the term ‘genre’ started to become more and more common.
In the 19th century, Social Realism took precedence over Romanticism and plots were common to be played out in drawing rooms of Jane Austen which depicted English middle class and upper class or even Gustave Flaubert’s french towns. Meanwhile, some of the masterpieces of Russian literature were developed in this period with writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky described his novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ as ‘fantasy realism’ and considered the monologues that Raskolnikov has with himself as elements of a psychological thriller.
Fiction in literature has been categorized into many genres and includes literature from dystopian stories to Holocaust writing and fictional autobiography as well. The diversification of the genre can partly be attributed to the major world wars that took place and the lives which were affected by it. Painful stories of wars wrenched human hearts and such literature became widely acknowledged.
While on one side the genres were getting diversified into subgenres, the style of writing on the other hand was expanding as well. ‘Epistolary style’, and ‘picaresque’ were accepted by audiences with open arms. Writers such as Mark Twain captured the diversity of US people and represented it in their beautiful stories.
Following that, the early 20th century was inspired by the industrial revolution, scientific developments, and technological advancements. Modern writers searched for new styles of narration and wrote fragmented narratives which represented their pain and anger and alienation of the new world that was forming. After World War 1, there was a small period of experimentation, and following that was World War 2 and the literature formation slowed down.
What followed after the two World Wars was an explosion in literature around the globe.
The world was ready for change and the post-modernist writers demanded more from the reader than simply one-sided narration. The stories were now with unreliable narrators, parts of magical realism, and open endings which was the first time in literature. Colonial and post-colonial writings emerged from Nigeria, India, South Africa which was filled with extraordinary creativity. Poets such as Rabindranath Tagore from India or Walt Whitman created exemplary pieces of literature.
As the literature expanded, so did the styles, types of narratives, and even tastes of audiences changed. From the beautiful words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the world slowly accepted the raw and straight words of Charles Bukowski. Variation and multi-culturalism were accepted as well right from Haruki Murakami‘s magical realism in East Asia, to Ruskin Bond‘s connect with nature in South Asia, to Steig Larrson‘s crime world in Europe to Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, all of them were included, read and acclaimed.
Come 2000’s to the age of the internet and we have much more variety in literature than it was ever before in history. As humanity evolves, technology advances and we explore space travel, the world of literature expands with it and we keep getting more and more stories.