Virtual Museum of European Writers

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Welcome to the European Literature Museum

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Mediev al

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Enlightenm ent Room

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eti Ll av ei de M

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Enlightenment

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Modern Literature Room Add Artifact 13

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Goethe •

Born: 28 August 1749

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Died: 22 March 1832

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Birthplace: Frankfurt am Main, Germany

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Best known as: The German dramatist known for Faust

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is one of the great figures in the history of German literature.

Early in his career he studied law, and in 1775 he joined the court of Duke Charles Augustus. For ten years he was a high-ranking minister of the state of Weimar, while at the same time working on plays, poems, essays, novels and scientific studies. He first gained literary fame with the 1773 play Götz von Berlichingen and the 1774 novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), and in 1775 he began work on his masterpiece, Faust. In the story Faust sells his soul to Satan in exchange for power and knowledge. The first part was published in 1808 and the second part was published in 1832, by which time Goethe was at the end of a sensational literary career and an idol of

Information acquired at: http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/joh annwolfgangvongoethe.html

the German Romantics. His other works include essays on botany and physiology, an autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, 1811-33), the prototypical Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1796), the epic poem Hermann und Dorothea (1798) and the drama Torquato Tasso (1790).

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Shakespeare

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Dickens

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Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) •

Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni (25 February 1707 – 6 February 1793) was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title "Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade," which he claimed in his memoirs the "Arcadians of Rome" bestowed on him. [1]

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Goldoni, a prolific writer, is best known for his comic play Servant of Two

Masters, which has been translated and adapted internationally numerous

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times. In 2011, Richard Bean adapted the play for the National Theatre of

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Great Britain, at the request of director Nicholas Hytner, as a vehicle for actor James Corden. The adaptation, One Man, Two Guvnors, became a smash hit, transferring to the West End and in 2012 to Broadway.

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The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio The Decameron, also called Prince Galehaut (Italian: Il Decameron, cognominato Prencipe Galeotto) is a 14thcentury medieval allegory by Giovanni Boccaccio, told as a frame story encompassing 100 tales by ten young people.

Boccaccio probably began composing the work in 1350, and finished it in 1351 or 1353. The bawdy tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary import, it documents life in 14thcentury Italy.

In Italy during the time of the Black Death, a group of seven young women and three young men flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa, where no one lives, in the countryside of Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the evenings, every member of the party tells a story each night, except for one day per week for chores, and the holy days in which they do no work at all, resulting in ten nights of storytelling over the course of two weeks. Thus, by the end of the fortnight they have told 100 stories.

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Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach Parzival is a major medieval German romance by the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the Middle High German language. The poem, commonly dated to the first quarter of the 13th century, is itself largely based on ChrÊtien de Troyes’s Perceval, the Story of the Grail and mainly centers on the Arthurian hero Parzival (Percival in English) and his long quest for the Holy Grail following his initial failure to achieve it.

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Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri Dante Aligheri (1265–1321)was a major Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called

Commedia and later called Divina by Boccaccio, is considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova. While the vision of Hell, the

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Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate.

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The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz he Book of Good Love (El Libro de Buen Amor), considered to be one of the masterpieces of Spanish poetry, is a semibiographical account of romantic adventures by Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, dating from 1330.

The work is considered as the best piece in the medieval genre known as Mester de ClerecĂ­a.

The Book begins with prayers and a guide as to how to read the work, followed by stories each containing a moral and often comical tale

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Song of My Cid Cantar de Mio Cid, ( English: “Song of My Cid”: ) also called Poema De Mio Cid, Spanish epic poem of the mid-12th century, the earliest surviving monument of Spanish literature and generally considered one of the great medieval epics and one of the masterpieces of Spanish literature.

The poem tells of the fall from royal favour and the eventual vindication of the Castilian 11th-century noble and military leader Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (1043–99), popularly known as the Cid, who became Spain’s national hero. The original manuscript of the poem, believed to have been composed about 1140, has been lost; the earliest existing copy, called Poema del Cid, dates from 1307.

Image acquired at: http://biblio.nsrecuerdo.com/micaza/miocid.htm

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The Pigeon by Patrick S端skind The Pigeon (German: Die Taube), written in 2005, is a novella by Patrick S端skind about the fictional character Jonathan Noel, a solitary Parisian bank security guard who undergoes an existential crisis when a pigeon roosts in front of his one-room apartment's door, prohibiting him entrance to his private sanctuary. The story takes place in the span of one day, and follows how this seemingly insignificant event compounds to threaten Noel's sanity. The titular pigeon is a symbol for disorder intruding on the protagonist's meticulously

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organized existence. This book is S端skind's followup to his first novel, Perfume. The story resembles Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"

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Baruch de Spinoza (16321677) Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin. He is considered to be one of the great Rationalist philosophers of the 17th century.

His work, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes's mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important contributors.

In Ethics he tried to explain how people can best find happiness. He argued that God and nature are the thing.

Happiness is to be found in the intellectual love of God/nature, which humans attain through reason and understanding. “The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, is to understand things by intuition.� His belief that knowledge of God was open to all people angered the church leaders of his time.

Spinoza died of a lung ailment in 1677. Because his writings were so controversial, he only published one during his lifetime under his own name. Following his death his friends collected several of his works, including Ethics, and published them.

Even after his death, this and his other writings were banned in Holland.

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Benito Jer贸nimo Feijoo (1676-1764) Benito Jer贸nimo Feijoo y Montenegro was a Galician neoclassical monk and scholar noted for encouraging scientific thought in Galicia and Spain.

He was born in Casdemiro, joined the Benedictines at the age of 12, and took classes in Galicia, Le贸n, and Salamanca. He later taught theology and philosophy at the university of Oviedo, and died at Oviedo. Padre Feijoo studied in Salamanca, Spain, at the University of Oviedo, earning a professorship in theology. Feijoo was a prominent essayist for the Spanish, and his critiques, letters, and plays helped change the steadfast beliefs of many during the 18th century.

His two famous multi-volume collection of essays, Teatro critico universal (1726-1739) and Cartas eruditas y curiosas cover a range of subjects, from education, law, and medicine, to superstitions and popular beliefs. He is also of interest as a writer in the Galician language.

Father Feijoo was a debunker of myths. He had great interest in natural science and many of his essays touch on topics related to this subject and to the many myths about creatures and lands that abounded at that time. One example of how far his naturalistic bent went can be found in a story told by Julio A. Feijoo, one of his descendents, born in Cuba in 1910. Father Feijoo believed that demonic possession was a psychological phenomenon. Once he was called upon to perform an exorcism, and in order to demonstrate that this phenomenon was more due to suggestibility than anything else, in performing a spurious exorcism on the "possessed" subject, he read from Bocaccio's famous bawdy work the Decameron. Upon hearing the Latin lines, the "possessed" individual settled down and declared himself to be free of demonic influence. [

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The House of Bernarda Alba

by Garcia Lorca The House of Bernarda Alba is one of the famous works by Federico Garcia Lorca (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936). He was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27 The House of Bernarda Alba was Lorca's last play, completed on 19 June 1936, two months before Lorca's death during the Spanish Civil War. The play was first performed in 1945. The play centers on the events of a house in Andalusia during a period of mourning, in which Bernarda Alba (aged 60) wields total control over her five daughters Angustias (39 years old), Magdalena (30), Amelia (27), Martirio, (24), and Adela (20). The housekeeper (La Poncia) and Bernarda's elderly mother (María Josefa) also live there.

The deliberate exclusion of any male character from the action helps build up the high level of sexual tension that is present throughout the play. Pepe "el Romano", the love interest of Bernarda's daughters and suitor of Angustias, never appears on stage. The play explores themes of repression, passion, and conformity, and inspects the effects of men upon women.

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The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón The Shadow of the Wind (Spanish: La sombra del viento) is a 2001 novel by Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and a worldwide bestseller.

The novel, set in post–Spanish Civil War Barcelona, concerns a young boy, Daniel Sempere. Just after the war, Daniel's father takes him to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten titles lovingly preserved by a select few initiates. According to tradition, everyone initiated to this secret place is allowed to take one book from it, and must protect it for life.

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Kafka (1883-1924) •

Franz Kafka was a famous Czech-born, German-speaking writer. His best known works are The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial and The Castle. Not much of his work was published during his lifetime. He asked his friend to make sure that all his writings which were not published, including his three novels, would be destroyed when he died. Fortunately his friend did not destroy them, and they were published after Kafka’s death.

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Kafka’s writings are about the frightening world around him which he often did not understand. A typical situation in his books might be someone who has gone somewhere to take a

Information taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

message, but he does not know what the message is or who it is for. The people he meets confuse him even more.

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nightmarish

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strange,

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Serafino Gubbio’s Journal by Luigi Pirandello Luigi Pirandello (1867 – 10 December 1936)was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage".

Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners for Theatre of the Absurd.

Originally published in Italian in 1925. Serafino Gubbio’s Journal is one of the first novels to take as its subject the heady world of early motion pictures. Based on the absurdist journals of fictional Italian camera operator.

From the film studio Kosmograph, Pirandello's Gubbio steadily winds the crank of his camera by day and scribbles with his pen by night, revealing the world both mundane and melodramatic that unfolds in front of his camera. Through Gubbio's narrative—saturated with fantasy and folly— Pirandello grapples with the philosophical implications of modernity. Like much of Pirandello's work, Shoot! parodies human weaknesses, drawing attention to the themes of isolation and madness as emerging tendencies in the modern world.

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Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlman Measuring the World (German: Die Vermessung der Welt) is a 2005 novel by German author Daniel Kehlmann. The novel re-imagines the lives of German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and German geographer Alexander von Humboldt – who was accompanied on his journeys by Aimé Bonpland – and their many groundbreaking ways of taking the world's measure, as well as their travels in South America and their meeting in 1828.

Daniel Kehlmann (born 13 January 1975) is a German language author of both Austrian and German nationality. His work Die Vermessung der Welt (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway as Measuring the World, 2006) is the best selling novel in the German language since Patrick Süskind's Perfume was released in 1985. Kehlmann's works, and in particular Die Vermessung der Welt, are heavily influenced by Latin American magical realism and represent a dramatic shift from the goals of the influential Group 47. He was awarded the Heimito von Doderer prize for the novel.

Information taken from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_the_Wor ld

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La Regenta by Clarin •

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La Regenta is a realist novel by Spanish author Leopoldo Alas y Ureña, also known as Clarín, published in 1884 and 1885.

The story is set in Vetusta (a provincial capital city, very identifiable with Oviedo, capital of Asturias), where the main character of the work, Ana Ozores "La Regenta", marries the former prime magistrate of the city, Víctor Quintanar, a kind but fussy man much older than she.

Feeling sentimentally abandoned, Ana lets herself be courted by the province casanova, Álvaro Mesía. To complete the circle, D. Fermín de Pas (Ana's confessor and canon in the cathedral of Vetusta) also falls in love with her and becomes Mesía's unmentionable rival.

The author uses the city of Vetusta as a symbol of vulgarity, lack of culture and hypocrisy. On the other hand, Ana incarnates the tortured ideal that perishes progressively before a hypocritical society. With these forces in tension, the Asturian writer narrates a cruel story of Spanish provincial life in the days of the Restoration.

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Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo Zeno's Conscience (Italian: La coscienza di Zeno) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Svevo (pseudonym for Aron Ettore Schmitz) . The main character is Zeno Cosini and the book is the fictional character's memoirs that he keeps at the insistence of his psychiatrist.

Throughout the novel, we learn about his father, his business, his wife, and his tobacco habit. The novel was self-published in 1923. The original English translation was published under the title Confessions of Zeno .

Born in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary) as Aron Ettore Schmitz to a Jewish family that originated in Germany, Italo Svevo (literally Italian swabian) wrote the classic novel La Coscienza di Zeno (rendered as Confessions of Zeno, or Zeno's Conscience) and self-published it in 1923. The work, showing the author's interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, is written in the form of the memoirs of one Zeno Cosini, who writes them at the insistence of his psychoanalyst. Schmitz's novel received almost no attention from Italian readers and critics at the time.

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The New Life by O Pamuk •

Ferit Orhan Pamuk (generally known simply as Orhan Pamuk; born on 7 June 1952) is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over eleven million books in sixty languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.

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Born in Istanbul, Pamuk is Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches comparative literature and writing. His novels include The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is

Red and Snow.

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The New Life- published in 1994- centers around a young engineering student in Istanbul who discovers a "new life" in the pages of a book of the same name. The protagonist is so thrilled by this novel that he sets off in search of the new life it describes, finding a number of other readers who have

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become similarly consumed as well as a few people who seek to destroy the book because of the effect it has on its followers. No passages from the book are revealed, and readers of the novel are left to hypothesize about its nature through the actions of the main character and other obsessed readers.

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Titaantjes by Nescio Nescio", Latin for "I don't know", was the pseudonym of the Dutch writer Jan Hendrik Frederik Grรถnloh, born June 22, 1882 in Amsterdam and died July 25, 1961 in Hilversum, both in the Netherlands. Grรถnloh was a businessman by profession; as Nescio he is mainly remembered for the three novellas De uitvreter (The Moocher), Titaantjes (Little Titans) and Dichtertje (Little Poet). His reputation as an important Dutch writer was only established after his death.

Titaantjes (little titans) was first published in Groot-Nederland.

It is a semi-sequel to De uitvreter and again features Koekebakker as narrator, reminiscing about his time with Bavink, and the newly introduced characters of Hoyer, Bekker, and Kees, when he still had ideals. The opening sentence is "Boys we were -- but nice boys". The story then leaps ahead several years. Koekebakker is now a successful journalist, while each of the others have failed their ideals in one way or another. Hoyer has given up on changing the world, and works painting portraits. Kees has a blue collar job.

Bekker is a mid range official in the SDAP. The most ardent adherent to their youthful ideals, Bavink, went mad after being unable to create the masterpiece he had striven after for so long.

Information taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nescio

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