Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/History of modern literature

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Sadly not a good quality version of what this subject could be on Wikipedia. While I'm not a fan of using AfD for rewrites, this is an exception. If anyone needs any content from this, let me know and I can userfy. Sounds like the opportunity for a good project this winter.

Thank you everyone for participating and assuming good faith! If you disagree with this closure, please take your concerns to Deletion Review prior to my talk page. Thanks again and happy holidays! Missvain (talk) 01:32, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

History of modern literature[edit]

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This article is almost entirely a list of books and their years of publication. Not only is this not terribly useful, it looks to me like all the material on this page is covered already by some other article. Someone could write an interesting synthesis article on the history of modern literature. But judging by the other posts on this talk page, no one has come forward to do so in more than fourteen years. I think it is reasonable to conclude at this point that no one ever will. Posting on the relevant WikiProjects didn't turn up any would-be-saviours. asilvering (talk) 15:26, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Arts-related deletion discussions. asilvering (talk) 15:26, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. asilvering (talk) 15:26, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Valid topic, content is mostly list-like of notable works. Article could be improved, but deletion is not the answer.--Mvqr (talk) 15:28, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete The topic is of course notable/valid, but as I said on the talk there "Yes, at the moment it's too crap to keep. Also, it mostly covers literature in English, with the odd burst of other stuff." And it has barely been improved over the years. It is VERY low quality, and complely erratic in its coverage, even of literature in English. Much of the first section, on the 18th century, is flat untrue. The only other possibility I can see is to cut most of it to leave a Timeline of 19th-century English literature (or "Literature in English") which is what it mainly covers. Johnbod (talk) 15:46, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
And with List of years in literature already out there, I think that second possibility is already covered. -- asilvering (talk) 16:13, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - abortive effort, which does not match its title, has no substantive (non-list) content, lots of odd selection biases (linguistic and otherwise), and a bizarre notion of what constitutes "modern". --Orange Mike | Talk 16:36, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Starting "modern literature" at 1700 is just about defensible; cutting the short and atrocious C18th section to start at 1800 even more so, but that won't save this mess. Johnbod (talk) 18:39, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Some other action besides keep. I'm reluctant to support outright deletion of what ought to be a vitally important topic, but the current article is of both low and inconsistent quality. If anyone wants to take a new approach to this article, I would support moving it to draftspace. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 17:09, 16 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Copy any useful bits over to other articles on this subject and delete the remainder. When the first versions of this page were written Wikipedia was a very different place and needed lots of pages, stubs etc to be started or at least attempted in the hope that they would be later improved. If I remember correctly from all those years ago this article was a fork from the main History of Literature page. Since then it has been superseded by other pages and by additions to the main page. I'm often slightly embarrassed by things I wrote 17 years ago when I saw Wikipedia as an egalitarian fun social activity to which everybody could equally contribute. The place has changed a lot since then and these old pages definitely need to be, at the very least, consolidated. wayland (talk) 02:56, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Missvain (talk) 19:28, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: an uncontroversially notable topic, and the present poor state of an article on a notable topic is very rarely a good argument for deletion. And the article's not that bad—a bit slapdash and very poorly sourced, but probably of interest to at least some readers, and there's not much in the unsourced material that would be too difficult to find sources for (it's mostly just dates of birth and publication). If we want to get rid of some of the literature articles that lack sourced prose and have basically been grandfathered in, I'd suggest starting with all the YYYY in literature articles, very few of which are likely to be notable. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 20:23, 24 November 2021 (UTC) Delete per the below. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 20:00, 30 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - Clearly notable subject. Article needs work but AfD is WP:NOTCLEANUP. HumanBodyPiloter5 (talk) 01:20, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Strong delete. Short version: although the topic seems "clearly notable," it only seems that way because the history of literature, broadly, is notable; the specific topic being questioned here, "modern literature" defined as "literature everywhere for the last 300 years" is one for which no sourcing actually exists: it is substantially broader than any actual field of study. Because the article cannot be written without substantial WP:SYNTHESIS, this material should be covered at the more-appropriately scoped articles which already exist.

Long version: The intended topic of this article-- the history of all literature everywhere since the seventeenth century-- is an umbrella concept containing many extremely notable sub-topics, but it is itself, in my view as a literary scholar, not an topic that can be meaningfully written from the sources. Literary study is subdivided into regions and places at the scale of usually a hundred years at most. Look at how the Oxford University Press breaks down their reference works, for example: the category "modern & contemporary" follows 19th century literature. (In other words, it is synonymous with the existing article on 20th century literature). Or consider the Cambridge University Press's offerings in the Cambridge Histories series-- nothing called anything nearly as broad as "modern literature." (The closest is the Cambridge History of Modern Arabic Literature, which does run from the 18thC to the present as this article attempts to, but of course only for Arabic literature). Even the Norton Anthology of World Literature (one of VERY few works which addresses works over a large timespan without a regional focus) does not contain a grouping for "modern literature" as defined by this article: Volume E covers 18thC-19thC lit in the subcategories "An age of revolution in Europe and the Americas," "At the crossroads of empire," and "Realism across the world," while Volume F is organized into "Modernism and modernity, 1900-1945," "Postwar and postcolonial literature, 1945-1968," and "Contemporary world literature."

Wikipedia's coverage of the history of literature should follow the reference texts by which the history of literature is recorded. In other words, it should be covered by century (18th century literature, 19th century literature, 20th century literature), by region/language (British literature, Italian literature, Arabic literature), and by period/genre (Romanticism, Victorian literature, Modernism). All of those topics are the explicit subject-- named that way in the title-- of many, many books providing the source for thorough articles to be written about them. These plentiful articles also make any narrowing or revision of the article here redundant.

(As a side note, YYYY in literature articles accomplish something very different from the topic-based synthesis articles, and are instead like the Days of the year articles, or the articles we have for each year: it makes no sense to ask whether February 19 is more or less notable than February 18, just as it makes no sense to ask whether 1727 in literature is more notable than 1968 in literature.)

For this article to be kept, I think it is necessary to identify at least 2-3 reputable books which explicitly cover the topic of modern literature, in the sense used here of world literature from the 18thC to the present. I certainly do not know of any. Providing sources is the normal way of demonstrating that a topic is, in fact, notable. If such sources cannot be found, the appropriate actions are either a narrowing of the article's scope to match the sources, or deletion-- and suitable articles already exist for all of the plausible narrowings. Accordingly, I strongly advise deletion.~ L 🌸 (talk) 02:57, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@LEvalyn: This is hard to argue with—I'd definitely assumed that at least a few "Introduction to Modern Literature"-type books would exist, but you're right that they really don't seem to. It would perhaps be feasible to use books like Franco Moretti's The Modern Epic, which self-consciously rejects traditional periodisations in order to bring together 19th- and 20th-century texts under the banner of the "modern" (Moretti may make a similar argument here), but any article constructed on that sort of basis would probably be a bit jarring for the average reader, and a single author wouldn't be sufficient to indicate notability anyway. I'll give this another couple of days unless anyone does turn up any sources, but will probably change my !vote after that. (For what it's worth I'm perfectly happy to delete all the days of the year articles too, and the year articles too, for the same reason, but perhaps that's neither here nor there.) – Arms & Hearts (talk) 19:52, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- @Arms & Hearts: Yes, it definitely feels like this sort of reference work should exist, but it really doesn't! (I personally find this a thrilling problem in the field.) I agree Moretti is the best starting point, and Moretti has had a few followers in what has been termed distant reading, but no one else really attempts "world literature" AFAIK; Ted Underwood's Distant Horizons, for example, makes some claims about British prose from 1800 to the present, but that is narrowed both by location and by genre. As much as I love their research, I cannot say it represents a current scholarly consensus the way that, say, the Norton does, as the anthology from which most high school classes are taught. (Also, I am happy to agree to disagree about the year articles, etc, so long as they all get treated the same way :) )~ L 🌸 (talk) 20:18, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - @Arms & Hearts: @LEvalyn: I'd venture that it doesn't exist because "literature from anywhere in the world from the 1500s onwards (i.e., the modern period)" as a massive umbrella category of literature specialties would describe the research interests of most academics working on literature. Who would teach this subject? What could we possibly hope to say about it? What department would even host it? With all those questions basically unanswerable, who would write the book? (Cutting the first part of the Early Modern Period out, as this article does for no apparent reason, helps some, but not enough.) The topic exists inasmuch as we can describe its boundaries, but we can describe all kinds of bizarre and unhelpful boundaries - that doesn't make them encyclopedic, or useful subjects of a Wikipedia article. Someone (not me) might consider writing up an article on Moretti's book, though. -- asilvering (talk) 22:21, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per LEvalyn. WP:TNT is our friend here. I do think this article is notable, but it needs to be rewritten from the ground up in prose in order to be useful to the website. Swordman97 ^{talk to me} 07:51, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per above. A WP:TNT delete. There is certainly a better article on this topic elsewhere on the project. User:力 (powera, π, ν) 20:13, 1 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.