A brief survey of Iloko literature from the beginnings to its present development, with a bibliography of works pertaining to the Iloko people and their language, by Leopoldo Y. Yabes.

A BRIEF SURVEY
OF
ILOKO LITERATURE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
"Literature...by its matter is in close affiliation with philosophy;
by its mode of treatment, with art. It would be deemed the very narrowest of literary study that should treat the content of literature as if
it were only philosophy, and ignore the element of art. It is an equally
narrow conception of the study that makes the whole a question of literary
art; and overlooks that literature is also a mode of philosophy."-Richard
G. Moulton. 1
"The study of the history of literature", say William A.
Neilson and Ashley H. Thorndike,2 "besides being a part of the
study of literature, is also a part of the study of history. It is
a chapter, and one of the most important, in the history of
human culture. Men have expressed themselves in pictures
and statues and buildings as well as in wars and constitutions,
but nowhere so articulately as in books; and through books we
gain an entrance not only into the life of individual authors
but into the life of nations and epochs. For young people
literature affords the most interesting approach to an understanding of the course of civilization. It touches on every side
the life and thought of the past and it records the progress of
mankind. No study is more surely cultural, for it opens to the
mind a view of 'the best that has been thought and said', a
history of the human spirit".
The study of the history of Iloko literature, more than
being merely the study of the literary history of the Ilokos,
is the study of the history of the development of Iloko culture,
if we are to regard literature more as a social document than
as belles-lettres, which we should do because literature is not
mere art but, as Richard G. Moulton says in the quotation given
at the top of the chapter, a combination of art and philosophy.
In the present study we shall endeavor to present an outline of
the development of the culture of a people, who have been much
talked about but very little understood, as reflected in their
literature oral and written. But in order more properly to
1-The Modern Study of Literature: An Introduction to Literary
Study and Interpretation. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1924,
p. 374.
2-A Manual for Teachers to Accompany a History of English
Literature. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1921, p. 5.