Word Asylum
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree

I have a research paper due! It is mostly done, but I just don’t know what he did for modern literature.

Spenser was largely responsible for popularising the work of Italian narrative poets like Ariosto in English, through his use of similar ideas and subject matter in his Faerie Queene. Shakespeare borrowed many of this themes and ideas from Spenser, to write fantasy plays like A Midsummer Nights Dream or Two Gentlemen of Verona. Shakespeare used Spenser’s strong and preposterous plotlines to make drama, not poetry – but without Spenser reviving the tradition of narrative poetry in English, Shakespeare might have had only the lyric poetry of Wyatt and Surrey to look back on, which would have limited Shakespeare’s sense of what was possible in poetry enormously.

And Spenser’s poetry is also dramatic in other ways. In Sonnet 81 (One day I wrote her name upon the strand), Spenser has the girl who the sonnet is addressed to speak herself in the sonnet. In Petrarch’s sonnets (the model for most European sonnets before Spenser) the girl never speaks. She is distant, and unobtainable, and silent; the sonnet is almost the boy just talking to himself.

In Spenser’s sonnet 81, the girl speaks for a full quatrain. This would have been an explosive innovation at the time – a girl who can talk!

Shakespeare takes the idea much further. When Romeo meets Juliet at the Capulet ball, each lover speaks the same number of lines. And Juliet keeps talking all through the play. Juliet is one of the first fully formed female characters in modern drama – she might never have happened without Spenser’s sonnet 81.

Why do the ideas of the hero and the journey, prevalent in ancient literatures, continue to be a theme of modern literature?

I have to write an essay on this and would appreciate if you could help me.

This is the end of our ancient greece unit, and I was thinking of comparing and contrasting ‘The Odyssey’, and either ‘Ender’s Shadow’ or ‘Ender’s Game’, in this essay.

The Odyssey is the best example of the epic hero journey.

Plot Type: The Quest
The Call
None in the book, references to the Trojan War
This Booker Plot goes in chronological order, not in the order Homer tells the story. That’s just the way it works; also, Booker practically built "The Quest" plot around the Odyssey, since Homer established some of the traditions of stories like this one. "The Call" is Odysseus’s yearning to go home from Troy once the city has been destroyed and the war is over. Along with the other Ithakans, our hero begins his journey home.

From Shmoop Lit/Hero Journey in the Odyssey