Literature has been around for eons, birthed and represented by those with a special kind of love for language. Literature exists in its purest form when it is read by true fanatics for the craft, appreciating the hours of work put in by the author. In fact, such is its power that with only quill and parchment, Shakespeare created characters that inspired modern-day stories, from films to retelling. Even famous fairy tales like ‘Snow White’ and ‘Cinderella’ have been adapted to fit multiple genres although the original stories span across a few pages.
In the very beginning, there were genres like romance, horror, tragedy and fantasy that shifted the very tone of the work. Shakespeare's ‘Romeo and Juliet’ never could be along the same lines as the Merchant of Venice. Whether it be characters or plots, the works are largely different, seemingly similar only in the style of writing.
Then came the terms. People coined various archetypes found in books such as the villain and the hero or the righteous protagonist and his comical sidekick. Words like white room syndrome, the lack of visual description in novels; purple prose, a type of writing that is deemed to be pretentious and unnecessary; tropes, interchangeably used with stereotypes; character arcs, the journey of a character throughout the story and many more began to surface.
Accompanying such terminology, literary analysis began to take shape. Largely influenced by world wars, colonialism and human rights movements, the literary analysis came up with multiple lenses with which to look at the text. Looking at a text through a formalist gaze or through a more psychoanalytic one can make all the difference in its interpretation.
Postulates of Freud and Jung were used to analyze the characters mindsets and the idea of the collective unconscious was used to identify even more archetypes, concluding that whatever differences the characters may possess, those belonging to the same archetype will have the same way of thinking and operating. For example, the hero with a saviour complex appears in both the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series. While these protagonists have different backgrounds, one can predict their role in the story and their actions when presented with a difficult situation. Each's purpose is to save the world from the merciless villain and lead to an end to the tyranny the people of the world are subjected to. He would always sacrifice himself over losing a loved one.
Apart from such in-depth analysis, what many amateur readers have rightly asked for is representation. While this is a part of the reader response way of analysis, it does not really look at the text objectively but still manages to yield better work from authors. In a world of political correctness, especially over the lockdown, authors, by demand of readers, have better cast marginalized characters whether it is in terms of race, gender or neurodivergent spectrums.
Conclusively, literature is an ever-changing, interdisciplinary field, working to either allegorically or directly represent our world and lead either to comfort through fiction or betterment of the present.
Prisha Jain
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