See also Augustine, Saint: conFessions oF st.
auGustine, the; Bambara, Toni Cade: saLt eat-
ers, the; Bradbury, Ray: Martian chronicLes,
the; Brontë, Charlotte: Jane eyre; Brontë,
Emily: wutherinG heiGhts; Chekhov, Anton:
seaGuLL, the; Dante Alighieri: divine coMedy,
the; Faulkner, William: sound and the Fury,
the; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: tender is the niGht;
Gay, John: beGGar’s opera, the; Hardy, Thomas:
Jude the obscure; Hawthorne, Nathaniel:
“Birth-Mark, The”; Hesse, Herman: siddhar-
tha; Keats, John: poems; Kundera, Milan:
unbearabLe LiGhtness oF beinG, the; McCull-
ers, Carson: heart is a LoneLy hunter, the;
Milton, John: paradise Lost; Morrison, Toni:
tar baby; Nabokov, Vladimir: LoLita; parent-
hood; Proust, Marcel: reMeMbrance oF thinGs
past; Shakespeare, William: haMLet; otheLLo;
Tolstoy, Leo: war and peace; Wharton, Edith:
aGe oF innocence, the; Yeats, William Butler:
poems.
FURTHER READING
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel.
New York: Dell, 1966.
Hagestrum, Jean. Esteem Enlightened by Desire: The
Couple from Homer to Shakespeare. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1992.
Siddall, Stephen, ed. The Truth about Love: A Collection
of Writing on Love through the Ages. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Antony Adolf
memory
Memory in literature is the written form of that
which has come before. Memories come from the
historical past but are also formed by social, political,
and religious events in the lives of literary characters.
Memory is employed in three distinct fashions,
which often exist concurrently in a text: first, to
establish the validity and importance of a text based
on the expertise and reputation of past writers; sec-
ond, as a means of instilling a feeling of nostalgia in
a text; and third, and most universally, as a method
of constructing individual and cultural identity.
The first construction is particularly prevalent in
the literature of the English Middle Ages and the
romantic movement of the 19th century, while the
second has been employed throughout the 20th cen-
tury by writers of both British and American origin
in the wake of the sociopolitical upheavals caused by
World Wars I and II. The third construction is ubiq-
uitous in all written works dealing with individual or
cultural issues, and because of this, memory serves as
a literary theme of profound importance.
The earliest written epic works establish mem-
ory as a central literary theme. Homer’s The iLiad
and Virgil’s The aeneid serve to establish the
character and ideology of the Greek and Roman
nations, respectively, through the blending of fic-
tional elements with the recording of great men,
heroic battles, and important, long-past events. It is
here that the use of the catalog, or list of important
historical figures, is employed not only to give the
work authenticity through the presence of verifiable
historical names and places, but also to convey a
sense of historical memory to works that are primar-
ily fictional in nature. Through the heroic actions of
Achilles and his comrades in arms on the battlefields
of the Trojan War, Homer sets down his view of the
national identity and character of ancient Greece,
a view that prevails today. Deliberately crafting his
work on the model of Homer’s by incorporating
elements both from The Iliad and The odyssey,
Virgil constructs a national history of Rome, link-
ing Augustus himself to the ancient world and thus
reinforcing his provenance to rule through the tale
of Aeneas’s journey from the ruins of Troy to found
Rome. Virgil, however, takes memory further in the
Aeneid: Making use of the catalog and of the pres-
ence of events from Homer’s work, he expands on
the theme through the instance of Aeneas’s dalliance
with Dido. Sworn to travel to the location of the
future Rome and establish the foundations of that
great city, Aeneas finds himself delayed by an affair
with the queen of Carthage; he seemingly forgets
his purpose and must be reminded of his destiny
by Mercury, messenger to Jupiter, the king of the
gods. In this manner, Virgil adds the importance of
individual memory to his text, expanding the role of
memory in his writing from a collective to an indi-
vidual construction.
Medieval writers, steeped in the Scholastic tra-
dition of thought, which required proof based inmemory 69