The poet and artist William Blake spoke about the role of Jewish literature in shaping western civilization he states that "the Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art." Northrop Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism is the third most frequently cited twentieth century work in the humanities and arts, states that in a sense all his critical work, beginning with a study of Blake which was published in 1947, and formulated ten years later in Anatomy of Criticism, has revolved around the Bible." Starting from Dante’s The Divine Comedy to John Milton 's Paradise Lost and Thomas Mann 's Joseph and His Brothers, the Bible has directly or indirectly inspired many of the greatest masterpieces of world literature. The Joseph cycle from the Book …show more content…
On the contrary, they searched for new forms of expression in order to find an adequate creative presentation of a changed reality with its new problems. Man was seen as the creation of heredity, environment and the conditions of his period; this led to the demand for a change of his circumstances to provide him with a chance of happiness in life. The naturalistic plays were concerned with the lower classes, particularly with the industrial proletariat, and with the outcasts of society. The public was to be enlightened by the picture of those miserable lives, and confronted with the proof that the order of society was unsound, even criminal. Politically, therefore, the majority of the naturalistic writers favoured the ideas of socialism in contrast to the existing system of society. As to the form of their works, the naturalists, true to their philosophy, attempted to give a meticulously exact picture of reality, as true to life as possible. The philosophical principles of Naturalism and its form were rejected by other writers who stressed in their works the intrinsic value of art, and who believed that literature was the place for subjective impression and feelings. There were young poets suffering under the hypocrisy and