An Illustrated Companion to World Literature - Peter Quennell

This illuminating survey of the literature of the world looks at, and in many cases provides extracts from, the work of well over 500 writers of poems, songs, plays and novels from several pages on Shakespeare to fleeting glimpses of the seminal names of different periods. To understand and appreciate these classic works of literature becomes far easier if we can also understand and appreciate the social conditions, the historical and cultural context in which the writer was living.

This is the knowledge that the authors of An Illustrated Companion to World Literature provide. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of unexpected illustrations bears witness to the fertile cross-breeding of the written and the visual arts throughout history There are prints, caricatures, book illustrations and jackets, photographs of people and places, scenes from stage and cinema, paintings and portraits as unfamiliar as the Danish Amblet, which preceded Shakespeares much more famous play. From Old Norse literature to the Romantics, from the achievements of the great Latin writers such as Tacitus and Virgil to the poets of the First World War, the authors range from the Epic of Gilgamesh, arguably the earliest work of literature in existence, to Solzhenitsyn and the new names of the 1980s.

The book captures the mood of each individual period, placing the writers, many of whose names we may only casually remember, in a new light so that we become curious to get to know them and their context better.