Literary Antecedents of the Absurd

As is well-known the concept of the Absurd is an off-shoot of Existentialism which \nwas born in the 19th century and reached almost global acceptability in the early 20th \ncentury thanks to the works of Kafka, Camus, Sartre and the Absurd playwrights like \nBeckett and Pinter. This paper tries to show that the Absurd had literary \nmanifestations in earlier literatures also. This does not aim to be an exhaustive survey \nof ―the tradition of the Absurd‖ as in Martin Esslin‘s The Theatre of the Absurd. A \nunique feature of this paper is the linkage which it establishes between the Absurd and \nthe Persian poet Omar Khayyam.