Literature is the study of human communication it deals of course with great writers from Shakespeare to Cervantes jane austen to james joyce and it deals with texts greek plays romantic poems gothic novels set in gloomy castles but it's also about more than that literature offers access to vibrant forms of expression and asks us to embrace new ways of thinking about the world it shows us how to read critically even asking why we read and write at all above all it explores how we communicate ideas and why so for a student of literature all froms of communication are considered texts and can become the focus of critical inquiry.
What makes a book a book is it just anything that stores and communicates information or does it have to do with paper binding font ink its weight in your hands the smell of the pages is this a book probably not we need to go back to the start of the book as we know it and understand how these elements came together to make something more than the sum of their parts the earliest object that we think of as a book is the codex a stack of pages bound along one edge but the real turning point in book history was johannes gutenberg's printing press in the mid 15th century.
The concept of moveable type had been invented much earlier in eastern culture but the introduction of gutenberg's press had a profound effect suddenly an elite class of monks and the ruling class no longer controlled the production of texts messages could spread more easily and copies could constantly be produced so printing houses popped up all over europe the product of this bibliographic boom is familiar to us in some respects but markedly different in others the skeleton of the book is paper type and cover more than 2000 years ago china invented paper as writing surface .
The middle english period we have the age of chaucer the timeline of the period is from 3040 to 1400 the age of chauceris the opening moment of english literature geoffrey chaucer lived under the rule of three kings edward three richard two and henry for noteable evens during this period are the hunderd years war which in lac fought with france bland death which is a bubonic plague caused by dads and the peasant rebellion the most important works of geoffrey chaucer are the canterbury tales the book of duches parliament of flowls house of field troilus and cressida and legend of good women.
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After the fall of Rome , many of the literary approaches and styles invented by the Greeks and Romans fell out of favor in Europe. In the millennium or so that intervened between Rome's fall and the Florentine Renaissance, medieval literature focused more and more on faith and faith-related matters, in part because the works written by the Greeks had not been preserved in Europe, and therefore there were few models of classical literature to learn from and move beyond. Although much had been lost to the ravages of time , many Greek works remained extant: they were preserved and copied carefully by Muslim scribes. What little there was became changed and distorted, with new forms beginning to develop from the distortions. Some of these distorted beginnings of new styles can be seen in the literature generally described as Matter of Rome, Matter of France and Matter of Britain.
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