Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (Audiobook) | Date: 12 April 2011, 09:22
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Novelists, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, essayists, and philosophers—whether famous or anonymous, many of Western culture's greatest figures have been writers.
Ranging from the anonymous author of the Epic of Gilgamesh in ancient Mesopotamia to William Faulkner writing about 19th- and 20th-century Mississippi 3,600 years later, Western writers have each played important parts in establishing the West's rich literary tradition. Their landmark themes, unique insights into human nature, dynamic characters, experimental storytelling techniques, and rich philosophical ideas helped create the vibrant storytelling methods we find reflected in today's authors. They've also played critical roles in Western history and culture as well, influencing everything from religion to politics.
[b]Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition[/b], 2nd Edition is your chance to survey over 70 literary geniuses and masterpieces of Western literature. In 84 lectures taught by five award-winning professors who are experts in particular literary time periods, you explore the vast collection of Western writers and their respective works.
With its broad historical scope and its depth of insight, this course is a veritable encyclopedia of Western literature's greatest writers. It's your chance to get a look at their works, styles, themes, and relationships with one another without having to pour through thousands upon thousands of pages of their writing. And you'll see the role they played both within the context of their own time and within the larger span of literary history.
[b]What Is the Western Literary Tradition?[/b] What do the words "Western" and "literature" mean in the context of writers as diverse as the ancient Greek poet Homer, the anonymous author of Beowulf, the metaphysical poet William Blake, and Modernist Samuel Beckett? How can we draw connections between writers who lived throughout the centuries in places as widely separated as the Near East and the New World?
The Western literary tradition, you discover in this course, derives as its main sources of inspiration the Bible and ancient Greek and Roman literature. While we sometimes think of literature as anything written, it is in fact writing that lays claim to consideration on the grounds of beauty, form, and emotional effect. To present you with an effective and comprehensive survey of Western writers, this course considers history, biography, essays, and philosophical works in addition to poems, plays, and prose fiction.
Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition is divided into seven parts consisting of 12 lectures each. The parts are grouped around various themes in the history of Western literature, from its origins in the Near East and the Mediterranean world to the literary heavyweights of the Renaissance and the men and women who defined the traditions of Modern literature in the 20th century. The end result is a course that spans 40 centuries of literary masterpieces.
[b]Witness the Birth of Literary Genres and Movements[/b]
Throughout Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, you witness how brilliant writers created and developed the various literary genres now considered staples of Western storytelling. Some of the many genres you explore include:
[list][*][b]Epics:[/b] Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are the first fully developed epics in Western culture. They were composed orally sometime before the invention of the Greek alphabet in the 8th century B.C., and they are the models for virtually all subsequent epics.
[*][b]Biographies:[/b] Composed in the first century A.D., Plutarch's Parallel Lives was immensely popular for centuries and served as the model for later biographies—and also as the source for some of Shakespeare's tragedies.
[*][b]Romances:[/b] The medieval romance—a stylized tale of love, intrigue, quest, and valor, often involving the court of King Arthur—is a 12th-century French invention. Interestingly, Gawain, not Lancelot, is the hero of most of these stories.
[*][b]Novels:[/b] Though there are ancient precursors to the novel in the works of Petronius and Apuleius, the modern novel arguably began with Don Quixote, written by Cervantes in the 17th century.
[*][b]Literary Criticism:[/b] The discipline of literary criticism was pioneered by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century in works such as Lives of the Poets.
[/list]In addition to new genres, literary movements played an important role in the development of Western literature. These various movements illustrate how writers reacted to their particular cultural environments and demonstrate the crucial relationship between a writer and his or her time.
[hide=Course Lecture Titles][list][*]1. Foundations
[*]2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
[*]3. Genesis and the Documentary Hypothesis
[*]4. The Deuteronomistic History
[*]5. Isaiah
[*]6. Job
[*]7. Homer—The Iliad
[*]8. Homer—The Odyssey
[*]9. Sappho and Pindar
[*]10. Aeschylus
[*]11. Sophocles
[*]12. Euripides
[*]13. Herodotus
[*]14. Thucydides
[*]15. Aristophanes
[*]16. Plato
[*]17. Menander and Hellenistic Literature
[*]18. Catullus and Horace
[*]19. Virgil
[*]20. Ovid
[*]21. Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch
[*]22. Petronius and Apuleius
[*]23. The Gospels
[*]24. Augustine
[*]25. Beowulf
[*]26. The Song of Roland
[*]27. El Cid
[*]28. Tristan and Isolt
[*]29. The Romance of the Rose
[*]30. Dante Alighieri—Life and Works
[*]31. Dante Alighieri—The Divine Comedy
[*]32. Petrarch
[*]33. Giovanni Boccaccio
[*]34. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
[*]35. Geoffrey Chaucer—Life and Works
[*]36. Geoffrey Chaucer—The Canterbury Tales
[*]37. Christine de Pizan
[*]38. Erasmus
[*]39. Thomas More
[*]40. Michel de Montaigne
[*]41. Francois Rabelais
[*]42. Christopher Marlowe
[*]43. William Shakespeare—The Merchant of Venice
[*]44. William Shakespeare—Hamlet
[*]45. Lope de Vega
[*]46. Miguel de Cervantes
[*]47. John Milton
[*]48. Blaise Pascal
[*]49. Moliere
[*]50. Jean Racine
[*]51. Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz
[*]52. Daniel Defoe
[*]53. Alexander Pope
[*]54. Jonathan Swift
[*]55. Voltaire
[*]56. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
[*]57. Samuel Johnson
[*]58. Denis Diderot
[*]59. William Blake
[*]60. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[*]61. William Wordsworth
[*]62. Jane Austen
[*]63. Stendhal
[*]64. Herman Melville
[*]65. Walt Whitman
[*]66. Gustave Flaubert
[*]67. Charles Dickens
[*]68. Fyodor Dostoevsky
[*]69. Leo Tolstoy
[*]70. Mark Twain
[*]71. Thomas Hardy
[*]72. Oscar Wilde
[*]73. Henry James
[*]74. Joseph Conrad
[*]75. William Butler Yeats
[*]76. Marcel Proust
[*]77. James Joyce
[*]78. Franz Kafka
[*]79. Virginia Woolf
[*]80. William Faulkner
[*]81. Bertolt Brecht
[*]82. Albert Camus
[*]83. Samuel Beckett
[*]84. Conclusion
[/list][/hide]
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