Table of Contents

Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10

Introduction
 

1. Epic Poetry
Oral Narrative Verse
Backgrounds for Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey
Passages for Study:
  An Egyptian tale from the 15th Century B.C.
  The doctrine of reincarnation in the Bhagavad-Gita
  The Origin of Poetry in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana
  Epic in Africa--Sundiata
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2. Sacred Texts
An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible
History in the Bible
Passages for Study:
3. Classical Drama
The Ages of Classical Antiquity: The Rise of Athens and the Western Tradition
Passage for Study:
  Pericles' Funeral Oration
Classical Drama
Passage for Study:
  Aristotle's Description of Tragedy
  The Hellenistic Age
  Roman Classicism
The Augustan Peace: Rome's Golden Age
Passages for Study:
  The Theatre Prologue to Kalidasa's Shakuntala
  Seami on the Art of No
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5. Renaissance Literature
Historical Background
Passage for Study:
  Columbus Reports from the New World
Cultural Change and Renaissance Literature
Passage for Study:
  The Lover: Petrarch
  The Lover: Shakespeare
The Prince
The Courtier
Renaissance Drama
The Age of the Baroque
Passage for Study:
Don Quixote and Baroque Prose
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7. Versions of Romanticism
An Introduction to Romanticism
Conflicting Interpretations of Romanticism
Reading Keats' "To Autumn"
Passages for Study:
  The Chinese Lyric
  The Japanese Lyric
  The Arabic Lyric
  From Emerson's "Self-Reliance": Sententiae and Transcendentalism
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8. Nineteenth-Century Prose Narrative
A Brief Intoduction to the Novel
Passages for Study:
Women's voices in the novel -- from Pamela to Jane Eyre
  African-American women and the Slave Narrative
Realism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Naturalism
Passage for Study:
  Naturalism in the American Novel
Symbolism: Toward the Twentieth Century
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9. Modern Drama
Nineteenth-Century Theatre: Toward the Modern Drama
Realism -- The First Phase
The Rejection of Realism -- The Second Phase
Passages for Study:
  Bertolt Brecht on "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting"
  Dialogue in the Theatre of the Absurd
  Wole Soyinka on Myth and Tragedy in Yoruba Culture
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10. Twentieth-Century Prose and Poetry
An Introduction to Modernism
Passage for Study:
  The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Modern Novel
The European Modernist as Exile: James Joyce
Passages for Study:
  Modernism and the Self-Conscious Novel
  Politics and Literature in Modern China
Communities of Modernists
A Survey of Recent Prose Fiction
The Writer in African Society: Chinua Achebe
Some Post-Colonial Writers
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