Literature has a long history, one of the oldest we know of. Humans have told stories to one another for as long as we can tell, if ancient cave paintings are anything to go by. However, written tales are the oldest known stories we know of, as all of the oldest spoken tales have been entirely lost to time, dying with those who had heard them. But written tales, literature, has the ability to not only outlive its writer, but even those who had known it. Stories entirely lost can be retrieved and learned once more, as long as you can read them.

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Many other nations began to write tales, usually in reference to their gods and their stories, and in particular, plays began to be written in Ancient Greece, tragedies and comedies, works that drew heavily from their Greek mythology and managed to influence the structure of stories to this very day, and they are oldest recorded instances of tragic narratives. Many of the core concepts of the tragedy, such as the idea of the hero having a fatal flaw, causing a reversal of fortune (terms coined Hamartia and Peripeteia respectively by literary analysts) persisted in the works of Roman and subsequently Italian writers, who wrote their own stories and tragedies, as well as comedies.

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Of those, the most famous and notorious of these was the work of a man named Shakespeare, who’s tragic plays have become notorious to almost the entire western world. His plays, primarily “Romeo and Juliet”, “Hamlet” and “McBeth” are famous all around the globe and almost known by all. Many other landmark works, were later written, including J.R.R Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, a book so famous that according to some sources, at one time it was the second most read text in the western world, second only to the Bible

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There are of course many other works of significance that I have not mentioned. There is the Ancient Chineese text known as the “Journey to the west” as well as the other three great classical novels of China. There are also works of great scientific importance, such as Isaac Newton’s “Principia”, or the fantasy stories of “Baeowolf” that inspired a large amounts of the “Lord of the Rings” prequel, “The Hobbit”, a book almost as equally known as its sequel. There are also many other literary works of great importance, such as “The Divine Comedy” of Dante Aligheri, The works of George Orwell and in more recent times books such as the Metro series of Dmitry Glukhovsky and so, so much more. There is a lot more to discuss in relation to books, but this should serve to help you get an idea of the way I will discuss about literary works, summarizing their plots, discussing its themes and characters, examining its inspiration and possibly going on literary tangents every once in a while!