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Forms of Literature – 3

Literary forms like epic, lyric poetry, the novel, science fiction, fairy tales, ghost stories, folktales, and drama, across space, culture, and time, are constantly evolving while retaining recognizable features. For example, Rafael Landívar based his epic poem about the people and land of Mexico, the Rusticatio Mexicana (1782) on the form of Vergil's Aeneid, but drew inspiration for the content from pastoral poetry as well as local, indigenous knowledge. The revenge plays popular in Elizabethan England, like Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet, adapted the Roman tragedies of Seneca, with their gruesome tales of murder and vengeance, rich with ghosts and other supernatural elements. Science fiction may seem like a modern genre, but in the second century CE, the Syrian author Lucian wrote a story about a journey to the moon, and into the depths of the sea, into the belly of a whale, the True Histories. Is this the world's first science fiction novel? What does this tale have in common with Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1871)? What narrative elements do the Jataka Tales, Aesop's Fables, and One Thousand and One Nights have in common? How did modernist poets like Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Rabindranath Tagore respond to literary traditions, as they sought to re-invent poetic forms? In this course, we will seek to understand the forms of literature by examining their creative metamorphoses over time, from antiquity to the present.

Study at Ashoka

Study at Ashoka

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