Literature existed somewhere at the beginning of civilization. The oldest known texts are the Vedas known as hymns to God. He consisted of reciting mantras and offering fire sacrifices to appease the Gods. Most of these texts contain poetic language. One of the texts deals with sorcery and black magic and is called the Atharva Veda. The texts perpetrated the heinous caste system whereby Brahmins were considered superior to all other castes. The Vedas assumed that gods must be placed so that humans can live on earth.

There were also other texts from India, mainly the Ramayana and the Mahabartha: the twin epics consisting of fables related to the war between the forces of good and evil, where the forces of good triumph. Then there is also the Bhagvat Geeta, a text of moral writing. The text talks about the origin of man and the purpose of man in life. The texts emulate man to overcome the cycle of birth and rebirth and merge with the eternal Brahman (God).

So the most important text in literature, one that encompasses everything, is the sacred one, the Bible. The Bible is historical, literary, poetic and biblical as well as eschatological. Historically it represents the struggle of the Jews between the exodus and the diaspora. The stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph stand out. The Jews are a nation that fought hard for its existence and needed a supernatural force to attract and comfort. There are many books in the Bible that are poetic and literary. The Song of Songs celebrates the love between husband and wife. Proverbs are instructional literature and form a collection of wisdom books. The Gospels are richly clothed in the mantle of man’s relationship with God and the perfect way to be happy in godliness and happiness. The Sermon on the Mount is a work of poetic prose. Notable is the verse: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. The proverbs are a text of biblical wisdom and address the issue of how to lead a good life. Christian eschatology is related to death and the final judgment and is part of apocalyptic literature.

Next I would like to comment on the Elizabethan literary school of which Shakespeare is a giant. Most of Shakespeare’s dramas are written about court life, intrigue, political turmoil, and the establishment of justice on earth. Dramas provoke the human mind and engage it in a state of catharsis.
The medieval period is also significant in the work of Cervantes: Don Quixote. Don Quixote was in medieval times a satire of courtly traditions. To what extent is it relevant now? In the postmodern period, he qualified as a tragic hero who made the soul of life a rich trigger of passion.

Then comes the tradition of the Realistic Novel. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are its best exponents. The man began to be portrayed with the essence of humanism. The essence of the soul was not to be perfection but to be fallible. The realist tradition paid rich homage to the physical environment. The characters were put into the furnace to be melted down with souls.

The next type of fiction to emerge was the psychological novel. This type of fiction was influenced by the psychology of Freud and Jung. The minds became a series of Jungian archetypes. The novelist experimented with the Freudian Oedipus complex and the Electra complex. Vices and virtuosity balanced on a scale.
The novel that emerged during the war period was the surrealist novel. A surreal novel took shape as a rebellion against established forms of fiction writing. Surrealism is the juxtaposition between fantasy and reality. Art became escapism and forged identities that rebel with human consciousness.
The contemporary novel is based on a philosophy of Magical Realism where the fictional elements are real and absurdly phantasmagorical. The postmodern novel is also characteristic of extreme irony, a manifestation of consciousness as streams of consciousness, the unreliable narrator, satirization, and pastiche. There is a tendency to paint words and abundant play with figures of speech.