World Literature And Its Times Volume 4 British And Irish Literature And Its Times The Victorian Era To The Present 1837 10th Joyce Moss by Joyce Moss instant download after payment.

century is a shrinking sphere. Innovative

modes of transmission make communica-

tion from one continent to another almost in-

stantaneous, encouraging the development of an

increasingly global society, heightening the ur-

gency of the need for mutual understanding. At

the foundation of World Literature and Its Times

is the belief that within a people's literature are

keys to their perspectives, their emotions, and

the formative events that have brought them to

the present point.

As manifested in their literary works, societies

experience phenomena that are in some respects

universal and in other respects tied to time and

place. T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, for ex-

ample, is set in post-World War I London, when

Europe was rife with disenchantment. Coinci-

dentally, Juan Rulfo's novel Pedro Paramo, set in

Latin America over a spread of decades that in-

cludes the post-World War I era, features a pro-

tagonist whose last name means "bleak plain" or

"waste land." The two literary works, though

written oceans apart, conjure a remarkably sim-

ilar atmosphere. Likewise Aphra Behn's novel

Oroonoko, set largely in the British colony of Suri-

nam in the early 1660s, and Miguel Barnet's Bi-

ography of a Runaway Slave, beginning in 1860 in

the Spanish colony of Cuba, both feature defiant

slaves. The plots in this case take place two cen-

turies apart, suggesting that time, as well as place,

is of little consequence. A close look at the two

slaves, however—and the two waste lands re-

ferred to above—exposes illuminating differ-

ences, indeed related to the times and places in

which the respective works are set.

World Literature and Its Times regards both fic-

tion and nonfiction as rich mediums for under-

standing the differences, as well as the similari-

ties, among people and societies. In its view, full

understanding of a literary work demands atten-

tion to events and attitudes of the period in which

a work takes place and of