Western literature

This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Western literature" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article needs attention from an expert in Arts. Please add a reason or a talk parameter to this template to explain the issue with the article. WikiProject Arts may be able to help recruit an expert. (November 2008)

History of literature by era
Ancient (corpora)
Bronze Age Ancient Egyptian Akkadian Elamite Hattic Hittite Hurro-Urartian Luwian Lydian Sumerian Ugarit Classical Ancient Greek Ancient Hebrew Ancient Prakrit Aramaic Classical Chinese Classical Latin Parthian Phrygian Old Persian Old Tamil Sanskrit Syriac
Early medieval
Arabic Armenian Bactrian Byzantine Greek Coptic Gandhari Prakrit Geʽez Georgian Japanese Kannada Maharashtri Prakrit Pre-Proto-Mongolic Old Church Slavonic Old English Old German Old Khmer Old Malay Old Turkic Norse Pali Sabaic Saka Sogdian Telugu Tibetan Tocharian Welsh
Medieval by century
10th 11th 12th 13th 14th
Early modern by century
15th 16th 17th
Modern by century
18th 19th
Contemporary by century
20th 21st
Literature portal
v t e

Western literature refers to the literature written in the languages of Europe, including the ones belonging to the Indo-European language family as well as several geographically or historically related languages such as Basque, Hungarian, and so forth. Western literature is considered one of the defining elements of Western civilization.

The best of Western literature is considered to be the Western Canon. The list of works in the Western Canon varies according to the critic's opinions on Western culture and the relative importance of its defining characteristics.

Western literature includes literature in many languages:

See also