With the power of fiction, an author can travel through time to recreate an era they never personally experienced. Through meticulous research on the Roman Empire during Nero’s reign and the pre-Christian era, Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz wrote Quo Vadis (1896). Similarly, the famous historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, part of China’s Four Great Classical Novels, is set in the 2nd–3rd centuries but was actually written by Luo Guanzhong in the 14th century. In post-1975 Vietnam, there emerged a wave of historical novels such as Nguyen Quang Than’s The Oath Ceremony, Nguyen Xuan Khanh’s Ho Quy Ly, Hoang Quoc Hai’s The Storm of the Tran Dynasty and Tran Thuy Mai’s Empress Dowager Tu Du.

Literature creates its own era

Great authors or poets can also establish an entirely new literary or cultural era. To understand the stature of any great writer, they must be placed within the cultural context of their time. A brilliant poet is either the culmination of the cultural and spiritual essence of the time (the zeitgeist), or is a pioneer pushing that culture to new heights, becoming a symbol of the nation and era. Dante Alighieri, from La Vita Nuova (1294) to The Divine Comedy (1320), not only helped Italian become the literary language of Western Europe but also paved the way for the Italian Renaissance. William Shakespeare elevated the sonnet, a poetic form originating in Italy, into an English tradition while simultaneously revolutionizing the language in terms of vocabulary and grammar. In Germany, Goethe’s influence extended beyond literature to philosophy and natural sciences.