Literature Time Line - Progress Report

TIME LINE - Contemporary World Literature

Contemporary World Literature Authors and their Work

Historical Events Showing the Context of the Writing

1893

Sample Entry:

*Rabindranath Tagore, Punishment

Offered a new voice to Indian expression. He was a short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India. I enjoy the natural quality and the personal tone of his verse: "The carriage stands at the door. It is midday./ The autumn sun is gradually gathering strength." Etc.

1895 Higuchi Ichiyo, Child's Play

Notes:

ca. 1897–1902 Washington Matthews conducts studies of the Navajo "The Night Chant."

1899–1902 Boer War in South Africa.

1900

Boxer uprisings in China protest European presence.

Max Planck proposes quantum theory, the first step in the discovery of the atom.

1902 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

1903 Henry James, The Ambassadors

1903 Wright brothers invent the powered airplane.

1905

Sigmund Freud, Dora (Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria)

Rubén Darío, Songs of Life and Hope

F. T. Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto

1905

Modern labor movement begins with foundation of International Workers of the World (IWW).

Partition of Bengal based on Hindu and Muslim populations.

1907 August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata

1907 Japanese immigration to the United States prohibited.

1908

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems

1909 Commercial manufacture of plastic begins.

1910

China abolishes slavery.

Mexican Revolution (1910–11).

NAACP founded in United States.

Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London.

 1911 Constantine Cavafy, Ithaka

1911 Revolution establishes Chinese Republic after 267 years of Manchu rule.

1912

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

1912–1913 Balkan wars.

1913

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27) Insert your annotation here:

D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

1914 James Joyce, Dubliners, which includes The Dead

1914–1918 World War I involves Europe, Turkey, and the United States.

1915

Albert Einstein formulates general theory of relativity.

First transcontinental phone call, in America

1916

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, The Castle (1926)

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

1917 T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations

1917 Russian Revolution overthrows Romanov Dynasty.

1918

Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman, the first story in modern Chinese vernacular

Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto

1918 Women over 30 given vote in Great Britain.

1918–1920 Global influenza epidemic kills millions.

1919 League of Nations formed (U.S. Senate rejects membership, 1920).

1920 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

1920 Mahatma Gandhi leads India's struggle for independence from Britain.

1921 Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

1921–1929 Harlem Renaissance, black literary and artistic movement.

1921–1924 Knud Rasmussen documents Inuit culture and collects Inuit Songs during the Fifth Thule Expedition

1922

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Paris publication of James Joyce, Ulysses (imported copies burned in U.S. Post Office)

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

1922

Turkey becomes a republic.

Irish Free State established.

USSR formed.

Discovery of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb.

1923 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

1923 Earthquakes destroy centers of Tokyo and Yokohama.

1924-1926

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

André Breton, First Surrealist Manifesto, "Free Union"

Kurt Schwitters, "Anna Blume"

Paul Éluard, Capitol of Pain, "Woman in Love"

Aimé Césaire, "Do Not Have Pity," p. 2119

Joyce Monsour, "I Saw You Through My Closed Eye"

Premchand, The Road to Salvation

1924 Insecticides first used.

1925 Geriguigatugo and other tales narrated by Uke Iwagu Uo published in Italian and Bororo

1927 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

1928 William Butler Yeats, The Tower

1928

Sixty-five states sign Kellogg-Briand antiwar pact in Paris.

First Five Year Plan in USSR.

Penicillin discovered.

First scheduled television broadcasts.

1929 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

1929 Stock market crash heralds beginning of world economic crisis; Great Depression lasts until 1937

1932 Zuni Ritual Poetry published by anthropologist Ruth L. Bunzel

1933 Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding

1933 Adolf Hitler given dictatorial powers in Germany. Nazis build first concentration camps

1933–1937 Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth

1934 Stalin begins purges of Communist Party.

1935–1947 Kawabata Yasunari, Snow Country

1936

Premchand, The Cow

Leo Frobenius, History of African Civilizations

1937ff Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Anecdote of the Jar

1938 Alfonsina Storni, Ocher

1938–1941 Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan

1939 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

1939 Germany invades Poland and all Europe is drawn into World War II.

1940 Richard Wright, Native Son

1941 United States and Japan enter World War II.

1940s

Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), Love in a Fallen City

1942 Albert Camus, The Stranger

1943 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

1944 Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

1945 Léopold Sédar Senghor, Chants d'ombre

1945

World War II ends with dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

United Nations, Arab League founded.

1946

Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech marks beginning of Cold War Pan-African Federation formed

1947

Birago Diop, Tales of Amadou Koumba, "Mother Crocodile"

Bernard Dadié, "The Mirror of Dearth," "The Black Cloth," "The Hunter and the Boa"

1947

Massacres across Muslim-Hindu lines accompany partition of India and Pakistan into independent states.

Transistor invented

1948

Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos

Tadeusz Borowski, Farewell to Maria, which includes Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber

1948 Creation of Jewish state in Palestine.

1949 Communist People's Republic of China established.

Apartheid instituted in South Africa.

1950–1953 Korean War involves North and South Korea, the United Nations, and China.

1952 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

1952 Revolution in Egypt, which becomes a republic in 1953.

First hydrogen bomb.

1953 Discovery of DNA structure launches modern genetic science.

1954 Kojima Nobuo, The American School

1955

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

1956 Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, The Key

1956 First Congress of Black Writers meets in Paris.

1956–1957 Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy

1957

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, which includes The Guest

1958 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

1958

European Common Market established.

Algerian War of Independence (1958–62).

1959 Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Sultan's Dilemma

1960

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

Shono Junzo, Still Life

Clarice Lispector, Family Ties, which includes The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman

1960–1962 Independence for Belgian Congo, Uganda, Tanganyika, Nigeria, Cameroun, etc.

1961 Soviet astronaut orbits earth.

1962

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Snapshots, which includes The Secret Room

1962–1973 United States engaged in Vietnam War.

1963

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem

Naguib Mahfouz, God's World, which includes Zaabalawi Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Matryona's Home

1965 Recorded performance by Andrew Peynetsa of The Boy and the Deer

1966

Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution attacks Confucian tradition and intellectuals in China (1966–69).

First Dakar Arts Festival provides showcase for African culture.

1967 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

1968 Kamau Brathwaite, Masks

Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades, which includes Walker Brothers Cowboy

1969 American astronaut is first man on moon.

1970 Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain

A. B. Yehoshua, Three Days and a Child, which includes Facing the Forests

Gabriel García Márquez, Death Constant Beyond Love

1972 Ingeborg Bachmann, Three Paths to the Lake, which includes The Barking

1973 Arab oil producers cut off shipments to nations supporting Israel; ensuing energy crisis reshapes global economy.

1974 Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman

1975 Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman

1977 Bessie Head, The Deep River

1979 Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter

1980

Mahasweta Devi, Breast-Giver

Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

Lorna Goodison, Tamarind Season

1980s Widespread concern as damage to the environment is increasingly documented.

1983–1984

Famine in Ethiopia.

Ethnic and religious riots throughout India.

1986 Nuclear disaster in Chernobyl spreads radiation contamination throughout Europe.

1987

Floods destroy homes of millions in Bangladesh.

World stock market crash.

1989

Mikhail Gorbachev restructures the Soviet state.

Chinese government shoots thousands of protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square.

Berlin Wall demolished.

1990 East and West Germany united.

1991

United States and USSR agree to arms reduction.

Economic chaos and nationalist unrest bring end of entity of "Soviet Union."

1993

European Community, the West's largest trading unit, formed.

World Wide Web established

1994

Nelson Mandela becomes president of South Africa after first multiracial elections.

Israel and Palestine Liberation Organization sign peace agreement establishing a Palestinian state and begin negotiating its conditions.

1997 Scientists in Scotland create Dolly, the clone of an adult sheep.

1999 A European common currency, the "euro," is issued.

2000 Anita Desai, Diamond Dust, which includes The Rooftop Dwellers