World Literature Themes and Author Analysis

Posted on Dec 2, 2025 in English Studies

Sappho and Her Poetry: “To an Army Wife in Sardis”

Importance and Influence

• Influenced Catullus, Horace, and other poets/critics.
• Unlike Homer, Sappho’s poetry is personal and direct, not a long oral epic.

Context of Composition

• Early Greek poetry was oral. Sappho lived when women could claim authorship.
• Poetry shows folk-song influence of Lesbos, simple and direct.
• Only two complete poems survive; the rest are fragments.

Lyric Poetry Characteristics

• Lyric is defined as personal, direct, and less formal.
• Sappho was a leader/teacher of aristocratic women.
• Wrote about women, family, friends, and feelings.
• Poems were recited in private gatherings.

Poem Themes and Imagery

• Cavalry, infantry, oars = war imagery (strength, courage, pride, Greek identity).

Structure and Argument

• Two parts: (1) Armies, forces, pride; (2) Love, personal reflection.
• Key Idea: The “finest sight” is whatever one loves.
• Helen and Paris illustrate how love defines what is valued.
• Anactoria is an apostrophe (a personal address).

War versus Love

• War represents conflict/external issues.
• Love represents intimacy/personal feeling. The contrast is central.

Dramatic and Argumentative Style

• Begins with armies, shifts to love and Helen, and ends with Anactoria.
• Shows personal feeling plus argumentative logic (premise → discussion → conclusion).

Language and Imagery

• Light in eyes symbolizes love; footsteps symbolize emotion.
• Focus is on personal feeling, avoiding clichés.

Leo Tolstoy: “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

Author and Beliefs

• Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian novelist.
• Believed strongly in morality.
• Stories are local yet universal.

Context and Genre

• Written circa 1886 (notes suggest context near WWI outbreak, circa 1910).
• Written during the rise of Modernism in British literature.
• Genre/Style: Fable/Allegory with a moral lesson; simple but reflective; a local country story with universal meaning.

Plot Summary

• Pahom is initially content, but his desire for more land grows.
• He is offered unlimited land if he can walk its perimeter in a day.
• He overreaches and dies.
• Moral: Greed leads to destruction.

Themes and Significance

• Human desire is endless.
• The pursuit of more leads to death.
• Life is impermanent and paradoxical.
• Universal lesson: moderation, avoid greed.
• Fable is interpretable via Bible, philosophy, or ethics.
• A work of world literature: a local story with timeless questions.
• Tolstoy unites the particular and the universal, clear yet thought-provoking.

Structure and Characters

• Conventional plot structure: Exposition (content Pahom/family) → Conflict (desire vs. neighbors/self) → Climax (claiming land) → Conclusion (death, moral).
• Few characters; uses dialogue and creates suspense/surprise.
• Pahom is round and dynamic (desire drives change).
• Others (wife, sister-in-law, neighbors) serve supportive/reflective roles.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: “The Heavenly Christmas Tree”

Author and Style

• Dostoevsky, Russian novelist.
• Master of Psychological Realism (focus on inner life, moral dilemmas).
• Inspired by travel to London (industrial, harsh city).

Literary Context and Style

• Psychological Realism: Linked to Modernism; single point of view (POV); explores internal problems.
• Social Realism: Focuses on economic/social issues, often linked to Marxist thought.
• Dostoevsky contrasts with Modernism (form over responsibility) and Realism (morality, ethics, practical life).

Story Context and Devices

• Fictionalized journey to London → “probable impossibility.”
• Tale-like language with exaggeration used to convey truth.
• Devices: Irony (gap between words/meaning); free indirect speech (blurred narrator/character voices, ambiguity).

Realism versus Naturalism

• Realistic: Practical, factual, real-world, “story as it is.”
• Naturalistic: Environment-driven, deterministic, harsh portrayal.
• Dostoevsky is mainly Realistic, with some environmental touches, but not fully Naturalistic.

Rainer Maria Rilke: “At Sundown”

Poet and Vision

• Austrian poet (1875–1926).
• First to explore the unconscious in poetry.
• Known for concrete imagery.
• Wrote in four languages (German, Italian, Russian, French).
• Admired the child’s vision (pure, uncorrupted) → “child-wise incapacity to understand.”

Genre and Style

• Lyric poetry (focus on emotions).
• Impressionistic (nature blended with imagination).
• Subjective POV (personal vision mapped onto natural images).

Images and Themes

• Sunset is central.
• Evening is personified (raiments/veils, landscape contours).
• Stone ↔ star symbolizes emotional fluctuation.
• Themes include time, evening, solitude, reflection, nature, and passage.

Patterns and Techniques

• Gradual image progression creates a rhythm of emotions.
• Kinesthetic imagery (clothing, rising/falling heavens) shows motion as an emotional state.
• Blends objective nature and subjective perception.

Literary Movements and Context

Jean-Paul Sartre: The Wall

Industrialism (1760–1840)

• Humans became mechanized.
• Created a subject versus object split.
• Resulted in the fragmentation of the soul.

Existentialism (1840–1950)

• A response to the post-WWII crisis.
• Core belief: existence defines essence.
• Key philosophers: Nietzsche (“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself”), Heidegger, Sartre.
• Meaning is created by personal decisions.

Structuralism (1950–1970)

• Post-existentialism movement.
• Focused on studying the structures of experience.

Wole Soyinka: “The Trials of Brother Jero”

Genre and Style

• Satire: Uses wit to expose superstition and corruption.
• Comedy: Farce, exaggerated situations, stereotyped characters, physical humor.
• The work is not anti-religion, but shows how people are fooled.

Key Features

• Exaggeration/Farce is used as ridicule to critique.
• An attack on the community for gullibility and moral corruption.
• Humor is a tool of social commentary.

Chinua Achebe: “Marriage is a Private Affair”

Theme and Style

• Theme/Focus: Culture and tradition as sources of conflict.
• Uses a sentimental/emotional tone.
• Language/Style: Simple, clear language; short story form with climax near the end.

Ending Analysis

• The ending is suspicious/artificial, a quick wrap-up, which may be intentional.

Lu Xun: “The New Year’s Sacrifice”

Theme and Critique

• Critiques Chinese society, specifically the oppression of women and lower classes.
• Confucian values (family, ancestors) are shown as lacking kindness.
• Irony: Patriarchy oppresses women unnoticed.

Symbols and Structure

• Symbols: Offering/Sacrifice represents ritual plus human sacrifice.
• Hsiang Lin’s Wife is sacrificed, illustrating the cycle of oppression.
• Structure: Frame story with three layers: narrator → woman’s life → son’s death. Known as a “Chinese Regression Story.”

Style

• Simple, tale-like, everyday focus.
• Shows how ideology (societal norms) unknowingly sustains oppression.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa: “In a Grove”

Key Features

• Told through multiple perspectives.
• Uses unreliable narrators, making the truth unclear.
• Explores the subjectivity of truth and human nature.
• Creates ambiguity, prompting the reader to question justice and perception.

Yasunari Kawabata: “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket”

Style and Theme

• Japanese story written in a Western emotional style.
• Mixes narrative with descriptive imagery.
• Theme: Young love → boy offers a “grasshopper,” girl calls it a “bell cricket” (a symbol of love).

Point of View and Lessons

• Adult narrator recalling childhood.
• Lesson: The ordinary becomes extraordinary through love; perception may miss true beauty.
• Life Lesson: Cherish fleeting, special moments.

Devices

• Irony (expectation versus reality).
• Apostrophe (narrator addresses Fujio).

R. K. Narayan: “Forty-Five a Month”

Style and Themes

• Style/Narrative: Third-person narration; tone is irony plus subtle humor.
• Themes: Irony of life (parents exploited, no time for children); bureaucracy/exploitation (salary too little for effort).
• Life Lessons: Corruption, abuse, harsh reality.

Characters and Humor

• The Mother acts as a guide, helping the reader anticipate the outcome.
• Irony/Humor: Protagonist resolves to quit job but stays for a promotion; climax leads to anticlimax, creating humor.
• Irony (gap between expectation versus reality) reflects human weakness in bureaucracy.

Rabindranath Tagore: “The Man Had No Useful Work”

Type and Themes

• Narrative poem and allegory (hidden meaning).
• Expresses values of life; tone is satirical and ironic.
• Themes: Questions “useful work” → what counts as meaningful.
• Art/leisure is seen as waste (painter: “no time to waste”).
• Painting = art = waste challenges productivity norms.
• Lesson: Do not force meaning into every act; experience life itself.

Characters and Allegory

• Man: Idle, exiled for not fitting the busy world.
• Girl: Curious follower.
• Paradise/Earth: Structured life versus freedom.
• Elder/Chief: Authority, unable to grasp the man’s life.
• Allegory/Satire: Critiques the modern obsession with usefulness and routines. Irony: Elders dismiss idleness/art, yet these reveal deeper truths.

Gabriela Mistral: “Serene Words”

Theme and Imagery

• Comfort is central; life offers comfort.
• First line (“truth”) equals comfort → flower freshness equals pleasure/renewal.
• Imagery/Symbols: Life is the gold and sweetness of wheat → gold = value/beauty; sweetness = nourishment/pleasure.
• Uses visual and tactile imagery.

Contrasts

• Highlights life’s complexity through contrasts: Hate vs. Love, Brief vs. Immense, Sweetness vs. Gall, Weeping vs. Smile.

Jorge Luis Borges: “Rosendo’s Tale”

Author Perspective and Style

• Author’s perspective: Life and the world are absurd.
• Narrative Style: First-person, past/flashback.
• Theme: Personal development (youth → adulthood).

Structure and Irony

• Structure: Exposition (background/setting: Night, 1930, bar, two men).
• Explores the balance in life and actions.
• Situational Irony: A coward kills a man by accident, highlighting the unpredictability and absurdity of life.

Octavio Paz: “Two Bodies”

Core Idea and Relationships

• Two bodies face-to-face = intimacy/confrontation; back-to-back = distance.
• Face is a synecdoche for humans; bodies represent autonomy/personified relationships.
• Human Relationships (symbols): Waves → movement/union; stones → lifeless/no communication; roots lacing → connected; knives → hostile; stars falling → fragile/transient.
• Understatement is used for emotional impact.

Symbolism and Theme

• Night symbolizes hostility/anonymity.
• The story (referencing another work, possibly) involves five stages: Lawyer, Musician, Calligrapher, Drunk man. This represents the human search for connection/meaning.
• Theme/Interpretation: Humans seek external solutions; true resolution is internal/spiritual. Key moment: sleeping, “Shake” = inner cure present.

Comparative World Writing Styles

Chinese

Indirect, uses proverbs/metaphors; collective focus; respectful, avoids confrontation.

Russian

Deep, emotional, heavy; philosophical (life, death, destiny); direct or poetic.

German

Logical, structured, precise; long sentences; serious, values clarity.

French

Elegant, artistic, witty; uses irony and wordplay; refined emotion.

Nigerian (English)

Oral storytelling influence; uses proverbs; focuses on community, tradition, spirituality; blends English with local flavor.

Japanese

Polite, indirect, humble; subtle meaning; emphasizes nature and simplicity.

Indian (English)

Storytelling, rich detail; addresses tradition alongside modern issues; emotional, moral lessons.

Chilean

Passionate, lyrical; focuses on politics, social justice, and nature; blends poetry with realism.

Argentine

Intellectual, philosophical, playful; experimental; uses irony and paradox.

Mexican

Rich imagery, strong emotions; themes of history, folklore, and Catholicism; dramatic and humorous.

Arabian (Arabic)

Poetic, rhythmic, uses metaphors; respectful, formal; spiritual and worldly themes.