A history of Maltese literature : its nature and extension

Abstract

A history of Maltese culture may be said to reflect in various intimate ways the history of the whole: community. Since, much more than in the case of larger countries, Malta could never do without larger countries, which ultimately turned out to be a complex process of influences, adaptations and reactions, such a history, be it political, social or cultural, is necessarily bound to assume, or at least include, a comparative character. This may be all the more so owing to the fact that what one may euphemistically call foreign contacts were nothing less than foreign occupations. Consequently the conditions which characterize and modify the process of, say, a political history of subordination may boil down to be the inalienable causes of analogous conditions in the cultural field.