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Literature is any collection of Writing work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially , plays, and poetry. It includes both print and digital writing.
In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed.; see also Homer. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment. It can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.Literary criticism is one of the oldest academic disciplines, and is concerned with the literary merit or intellectual significance of specific texts. The study of books and other texts as artifacts or traditions is instead encompassed by textual criticism or the history of the book. "Literature", as an art form, is sometimes used synonymously with literary fiction, fiction written with the goal of artistic merit, A Beginner's Guide to Literary Fiction" | NY Book Editors.Girolimon, Mars. "Types of Genres: A Literary Guide", Southern New Hampshire University, 11 December 2023. Retrieved 3 September 2024. but can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography, Diary, memoir, letters, and . Within this broader definition, literature includes non-fictional books, articles, or other written information on a particular subject. OED
Developments in print technology have allowed an ever-growing distribution and proliferation of written works, while the digital era had blurred the lines between online electronic literature and other forms of modern media.
Etymology, the term derives from Latin language literatura/litteratura, "learning, writing, grammar," originally "writing formed with letters," from litera/littera, "letter." In spite of this, the term has also been applied to spoken or sung texts. Literature is often referred to Synecdoche as "writing," especially creative writing, and poetically as "the craft of writing" (or simply "the craft"). Syd Field described his discipline, screenwriting, as "a craft that occasionally rises to the level of art."
A value judgment definition of literature considers it as consisting solely of high quality writing that forms part of the belles-lettres ("fine writing") tradition. An example of this is in the 1910–1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which classified literature as "the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing".
Australian Aboriginal culture has thrived on oral traditions and oral histories passed down through tens of thousands of years. In a study published in February 2020, new evidence showed that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago. Significantly, this is a "minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria", and also could be interpreted as evidence for the oral histories of the Gunditjmara people, an Aboriginal Australian people of south-western Victoria, which tell of volcanic eruptions being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence. An axe found underneath volcanic ash in 1947 had already proven that humans inhabited the region before the eruption of Tower Hill.
Oral literature is an Oral tradition found in "all corners of the world." Modern archaeology has been unveiling evidence of the human efforts to preserve and transmit arts and knowledge that depended completely or partially on an oral tradition, across various cultures:
The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and law.
In Asia, the transmission of folklore, mythologies as well as scriptures in ancient India, in different Indian religions, was by oral tradition, preserved with precision with the help of elaborate Vedic chant.
The early Buddhist texts are also generally believed to be of oral tradition, with the first by comparing inconsistencies in the transmitted versions of literature from various oral societies such as the Greek, Serbia and other cultures, then noting that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have been composed and transmitted orally across generations, without being written down. According to Goody, the Vedic texts likely involved both a written and oral tradition, calling it a "parallel products of a literate society".
All ancient Greek literature was to some degree oral in nature, and the earliest literature was completely so.Reece, Steve. "Orality and Literacy: Ancient Greek Literature as Oral Literature", in David Schenker and Martin Hose (eds.), Companion to Greek Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015) 43–57. Ancient_Greek_Literature_as_Oral_Literature Homer's epic poetry, states Michael Gagarin, was largely composed, performed and transmitted orally.
As folklores and legends were performed in front of distant audiences, the singers would substitute the names in the stories with local characters or rulers to give the stories a local flavor and thus connect with the audience by making the historicity embedded in the oral tradition as unreliable. The lack of surviving texts about the Greek and Roman religious traditions have led scholars to presume that these were ritualistic and transmitted as oral traditions, but some scholars disagree that the complex rituals in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were an exclusive product of an oral tradition.Writing systems are not known to have existed among Native North Americans (north of Mesoamerica) before contact with Europeans. Oral storytelling traditions flourished in a context without the use of writing to record and preserve history, scientific knowledge, and social practices.
While some stories were told for amusement and leisure, most functioned as practical lessons from tribal experience applied to immediate moral, social, psychological, and environmental issues. Stories fuse fictional, supernatural, or otherwise exaggerated characters and circumstances with real emotions and morals as a means of teaching. Plots often reflect real life situations and may be aimed at particular people known by the story's audience. In this way, social pressure could be exerted without directly causing embarrassment or social exclusion. For example, rather than yelling, Inuit culture parents might deter their children from wandering too close to the water's edge by telling a story about a sea monster with a pouch for children within its reach.The enduring significance of oral traditions is underscored in a systemic literature review on indigenous languages in South Africa, within the framework of contemporary linguistic challenges. Oral literature is crucial for cultural preservation, linguistic diversity, and social justice, as evidenced by the postcolonial struggles and ongoing initiatives to safeguard and promote South African indigenous languages.
Many works of early periods, even in narrative form, had a covert moral or didactic purpose, such as the Sanskrit Panchatantra (200 BC – 300 AD), based on older oral tradition., Introduction, page xv; , Translator's introduction, quoting Hertel: "the original work was composed in Kashmir, about 200 B.C. At this date, however, many of the individual stories were already ancient." Translator's introduction: "The Panchatantra is a niti-shastra, or textbook of niti. The word niti means roughly "the wise conduct of life." Western civilization must endure a certain shame in realizing that no precise equivalent of the term is found in English, French, Latin, or Greek. Many words are therefore necessary to explain what niti is, though the idea, once grasped, is clear, important, and satisfying." Drama and satire also developed as urban cultures, which provided a larger public audience, and later readership for literary production. Lyric poetry (as opposed to epic poetry) was often the speciality of courts and aristocratic circles, particularly in East Asia where songs were collected by the Chinese aristocracy as poems, the most notable being the Shijing or Book of Songs (1046–).Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (AD 127–200), Shipu xu 詩譜序. In Chinese classics, early literature was primarily focused on philosophy, historiography, military science, agriculture, and Chinese poetry. China, the origin of modern paper making and woodblock printing, produced the world's first .A Hyatt Mayor, Prints and People, Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton, 1971, nos 1–4. Much of Chinese literature originates with the Hundred Schools of Thought period that occurred during the Eastern Zhou dynasty (769‒269 BC). "Chinese philosophy" , Encyclopædia Britannica, online The most important of these include the Classics of Confucianism, of Taoism, of Mohism, of Legalism, as well as works of military science (e.g. Sun Tzu's The Art of War, ) and Chinese history (e.g. Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, ). Ancient Chinese literature had a heavy emphasis on historiography, with often very detailed court records. An exemplary piece of narrative history of ancient China was the Zuo Zhuan, which was compiled no later than 389 BC, and attributed to the blind 5th-century BC historian Zuo Qiuming.
In ancient India, literature originated from stories that were originally orally transmitted. Early genres included Sanskrit drama, Panchatantra, sutras and epic poetry. Sanskrit literature begins with the Vedas, dating back to 1500–1000 BC, and continues with the Sanskrit Epics of Iron Age India.see e.g. ; Witzel, Michael, "Vedas and ", in: ; ; Sanskrit literature (2003) in Philip's Encyclopedia. Accessed 2007-08-09Sanujit Ghose (2011). " Religious Developments in Ancient India " in Ancient History Encyclopedia. The Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts. The Samhitas (vedic collections) date to roughly 1500–1000 BC, and the "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the shakha of the Samhitas, date to ‒500 BC, resulting in a Vedic period, spanning the mid-2nd to mid-1st millennium BC, or the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.Gavin Flood sums up mainstream estimates, according to which the Rigveda was compiled from as early as 1500 BC over a period of several centuries. The period between approximately the 6th to 1st centuries BC saw the composition and redaction of the two most influential Indian epics, the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana, with subsequent redaction progressing down to the 4th century AD such as Ramcharitmanas.Lutgendorf, Philip (1991). The Life of a Text. University of California Press. p. 1.The earliest known Greek writings are Mycenaean (–1100 BC), written in the Linear B syllabary on clay tablets. These documents contain prosaic records largely concerned with trade (lists, inventories, receipts, etc.); no real literature has been discovered.
The Hebrew religious text, the Torah, is widely seen as a product of the Persian period (539–333 BC, probably 450–350 BC). This consensus echoes a traditional Jewish view which gives Ezra, the leader of the Jewish community on its return from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation. This represents a major source of Christianity's Bible, which has had a major influence on Western literature.
The beginning of Roman literature dates to 240 BC, when a Roman audience saw a Latin version of a Greek play.Duckworth, George Eckel. The nature of Roman comedy: a study in popular entertainment. University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. p. 3. Web. 15 October 2011. Literature in Latin would flourish for the next six centuries, and includes essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings.
the main Religious text of Islam, had a significant influence on the Arab language, and marked the beginning of Islamic literature. Muslims believe it was transcribed in the Arabic dialect of the Quraysh, the tribe of Muhammad. As Islam spread, the Quran had the effect of unifying and standardizing Arabic.Theological works in Latin were the dominant form of literature in Europe typically found in libraries during the Middle Ages. Western culture Vernacular literature includes the Poetic Edda and the sagas, or heroic epics, of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the German Song of Hildebrandt. A later form of medieval fiction was the romance, an adventurous and sometimes magical narrative with strong popular appeal.
Controversial, religious, political and instructional literature proliferated during the European Renaissance as a result of the Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing pressElizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge University Press, 1980 around 1440, while the Medieval romance developed into the novel.Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware and was spread to Korea later. Around 1230, Koreans invented a metal type movable printing. East metal movable type was spread to Europe between the late 14th century and early 15th century.Thomas Franklin Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward, The Ronald Press, NY 2nd ed. 1955, pp. 176–178
In , Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in Europe. This invention gradually made books less expensive to produce and more widely available.Early printed books, single sheets, and images created before 1501 in Europe are known as or incunabula. "A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330."Clapham, Michael, "Printing" in A History of Technology, Vol 2. From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, edd. Charles Singer et al. (Oxford 1957), p. 377. Cited from Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University, 1980).
Eventually, printing enabled other forms of publishing besides books. The history of newspaper publishing began in Germany in 1609, with the publishing of magazines following in 1663.
There were few English-language women poets whose names are remembered until the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century some notable individuals include Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson (see American poetry). But while generally women are absent from the European canon of Romantic poetry, there is one notable exception, the French novelist and memoirist Amantine Dupin (1804 – 1876) best known by her pen name George Sand. One of the more popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) is the first major English woman novelist, while Aphra Behn is an early female dramatist.
Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded between 1901 and 2020 to 117 individuals: 101 men and 16 women. Selma Lagerlöf (1858 – 1940) was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in The Swedish Academy in 1914.
Feminism have since the twentieth century sought to expand the literary canon to include more women writers.
The following, by the British author William Boyd on the short story, might be applied to all prose fiction:
short seem to answer something very deep in our nature as if, for the duration of its telling, something special has been created, some essence of our experience extrapolated, some temporary sense has been made of our common, turbulent journey towards the grave and oblivion.
The very best in literature is annually recognized by the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is awarded to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction" (original Swedish: den som inom litteraturen har producerat det mest framstående verket i en idealisk riktning).
Psychologist Abraham Maslow ideas help literary critics understand how characters in literature reflect their personal culture and the history. The theory suggests that literature helps an individual's struggle for self-fulfillment.
The King James Version of the Bible has been called "the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language", "the most important book in English religion and culture", and "arguably the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world," principally because of its literary style and widespread distribution. Prominent Atheism figures such as the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have praised the King James Version as being "a giant step in the maturing of English literature" and "a great work of literature", respectively, with Dawkins adding: "A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian".
Societies in which preaching has great importance, and those in which religious structures and clergy have a near-monopoly of literacy and/or a censorship role (as, for example, in the European Middle Ages), may impart a religious gloss to much of the literature those societies produce or retain. The traditions of close study of religious texts has furthered the development of techniques and theories in literary studies.
Prior to the 19th century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines: "any kind of subject consisting of or Verses". Possibly as a result of Aristotle's influence (his Poetics), "poetry" before the 19th century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition; hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.
On the historical development of prose, Richard Graff notes that, in the case of ancient Greece, "recent scholarship has emphasized the fact that formal prose was a comparatively late development, an 'invention' properly associated with the classical period".
Latin was a major influence on the development of prose in many European countries. Especially important was the great Roman orator Cicero."Literature", Encyclopaedia Britannica. online It was the lingua franca among literate Europeans until quite recent times, and the great works of Descartes (1596 – 1650), Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), and Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) were published in Latin. Among the last important books written primarily in Latin prose were the works of Swedenborg (d. 1772), Carl Linnaeus (d. 1778), Leonhard Euler (d. 1783), Gauss (d. 1855), and Isaac Newton (d. 1727).
Although there are many historical prototypes, so-called "novels before the novel", the modern novel form emerges late in cultural history—roughly during the eighteenth century. Initially subject to much criticism, the novel has acquired a dominant position amongst literary forms, both popularly and critically.
Non-fiction can fall within the broad category of literature as "any collection of written work", but some works fall within the narrower definition "by virtue of the excellence of their writing, their originality and their general aesthetic and artistic merits".
The earliest form of which there exists substantial knowledge is Greek theatre. This developed as a performance associated with religious and civic festivals, typically enacting or developing upon well-known historical, or mythology themes,
In the twentieth century, Screenplay written for non-stage media have been added to this form, including radio drama, television and film.
Literary works are all works of literature; that is all works expressed in print or writing (other than dramatic or musical works)."University of London Press v. University Tutorial Press" 1916
A notable example of censorship is James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which has been described by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov as a "divine work of art" and the greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose.Nabokov, pp. 55, 57 It was banned in the United States from 1921 until 1933 on the grounds of obscenity. Nowadays it is a central literary text in English literature courses, throughout the world. Ulysses has been called "the most prominent landmark in modernist literature", a work where life's complexities are depicted with "unprecedented, and unequalled, linguistic and stylistic virtuosity". The New York Times guide to essential knowledge, 3d ed. (2011), p. 126.
The Nobel Prize in Literature was one of the six Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, and is awarded to an author on the basis of their body of work, rather than to, or for, a particular work itself. Other literary prizes for which all nationalities are eligible include: the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Man Booker International Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Hugo Award, Guardian First Book Award and the Franz Kafka Prize.
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