Reference Guide to World Literature: 001 by Sara Pendergast

Designed as a complement to the St. James Reference Guides to American and British literatures, the third edition of the Reference Guide to World Literature represents a comprehensive and authoritative survey to literatures written in languages other than English from the earliest known manuscripts to the works of present-day writers of international stature. Merging East and West, the ancient with the contemporary, the Reference Guide provides a broad spectrum of world literature extending from the anonymous prose and verse of the Vedas, the sacred texts of Hinduism, originating in the third millennium BC, to the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh; from the Hebrew texts of the Old Testament to The Iliad of Homer; from the Golden Age of Greek drama to the Indian folk epic the Mahābhārata; from the Confessions of St. Augustine to the classical poetry of the Tang dynasty; from The Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Farid al-Din Attār to The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighiera; from The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; from Molière’s Don Juan to Goethe’s Faust; from realism and naturalism to the advent of modernism; from existentialism to the theater of the absurd; from postmodernism to the literature of the new millennium.