Western literature - Topics

How did the short story develop as a form of its own? Who actually wrote down the Greek myths and how much did they change them? Where does the legend of Faust come from? Is it a problem that most world literature syllabi are still European novels? Is the legend of King Arthur folklore or history? How did the vampire legend move from village gossip to Gothic literature? Why is translating Homer or Dante so difficult? Who were the Muses and why did poets keep invoking them? Metafiction and the unreliable narrator: how did the postmodern novel turn on itself? Why did literary criticism split into so many competing schools? Why did unfinished works become respectable to the Romantics? How did gothic fiction turn into modern horror? The Byronic hero: why did brooding become attractive? How did the King James Bible shape the English language? Frankenstein captured the Romantic fear of science Wordsworth versus Byron: two very different kinds of Romantic Why do masked balls keep showing up in opera and literature? Why do postmodern novels love footnotes and fake documents? Derrida's deconstruction: does it leave anything standing? How did humanism change the way people read ancient texts? Why do schools still teach Homer and Virgil after two thousand years? What is the difference between tragedy and melodrama? Why do so many classics feel slow to modern readers? What makes an epic poem different from a novel? Should literature students still read the dead white male authors? What makes a dystopian novel endure? Can Herodotus be trusted as a historian or is he mostly a storyteller? How did the novel become the dominant literary form? How did the unreliable narrator become such a common device? What is stream of consciousness in fiction and who did it best? Why does the Western canon get argued about so much? Why do Nobel Prize choices in literature cause so much argument?