There are so many stories that can be considered as part of the Classical literary canon. Authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens have earned their place as household names for those, who like me, have an obsession with literature. However, there are also so many more new stories that get released every year, which leads us to question whether classical literature is still important to contemporary readers, or whether the stories written by Thomas Hardy and Emily Brontë are losing their appeal?
My answer is yes, classical literature is still relevant, at least in my opinion, anyway. I still find myself drawn to the love stories of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and even the macabre of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories – The Pit and the Pendulum and The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
I will always love these stories for the history that they represent and the fact that they help you to make a timeline of how literature has progressed and also how the values of society have progressed to the contemporary world we know now. These novels gave me an education in literature and I would never be as in love with books and reading as I am now without these stories.
There is even more evidence of their relevance in contemporary fiction. For example, in the book I am reading currently called Next to You written by Hannah Bonam-Young, the main characters Matt and Lane listen to an audio version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in a car during a very long drive. Another good example is how Hardin and Tessa’s shared love of Pride and Prejudice is touched on repeatedly in Anna Todd’s After, with Hardin even getting a tattoo on his back for Tessa of Mr Darcy’s words to Elizabeth – “I never wish to be parted from you from this day on.” These examples show me that the stories that have influenced me have influenced the writers that I enjoy reading now.
However, on the flip side, I can recognise that classical literature can be considered as repetitive and formulaic and therefore considered boring, which makes it lose its relevancy in the eyes of some, which makes sense, but the fact that other writers are taking inspiration from these great writers in their own stories shows me that classical literature must still hold some relevancy within the contemporary age.
On a final note, I want to say that classical literature should be and hopefully is still considered the building blocks for what we know literature to be. It is part of our history and in my opinion, should be cherished. We should celebrate the great writers of the classical genre for their work and for being the inspiration for the literary canon that is still being built upon in the contemporary age.
