Maltese literature : the pangs of birth

Abstract

One can hardly do any justice to Maltese literature in just one paper. So I will deal with the pangs of birth and early development of Maltese literature and stop with the birth of the Maltese novel which will take us to the threshold of the 20th century. A language and its people are intimately and inextricably bound together so that a language lives and develops with its people, and its greatness rests upon its users and their attitude towards it. Such an attitude comes out in literature, because the language of a past era gathers its identity from the character and quality of its literature. Official documents and notarial deeds yield shelves of secrets to the researcher, be he a historian, a philologist, or a lexicographer, but it is in literature that a language manifests its potential to transform a people's emotions and thoughts into an expressive form conveying a memorable experience.