Literature (from Latin litterae (plural); letter) is the art of
written
work. The word literature literally means: "things made from letters".
Literature is commonly classified as having two major forms—fiction and
non-fiction—and two major techniques—poetry and prose.
Literature may consist of texts based on factual information (journalistic or non-fiction), a category that may also include
polemical works,
biography, and reflective essays, or it may consist of texts based on imagination (such as fiction,
poetry,
or drama). Literature written in poetry emphasizes the aesthetic and
rhythmic qualities of language—such as sound, symbolism, and metre—to
evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, ordinary meanings, while
literature written in prose applies ordinary grammatical structure and
the natural flow of speech. Literature can also be classified according
to historical periods, genres, and political influences. While the
concept of genre has broadened over the centuries, in general, a genre
consists of artistic works that fall within a certain central theme;
examples of genre include
romance,
mystery,
crime,
fantasy,
erotica, and
adventure, among others.
Important historical periods in
English literature include
Old English,
Middle English, the
Renaissance, the
Elizabethan era of the 16th century (which includes the
Shakespearean era), the 17th Century
Restoration period, the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, the Romanticism of the early 19th century, the later 19th Century
Victorian, and 20th Century
Modernism and
Post-modernism. Important intellectual movements that have influenced the study of literature include
feminism,
post-colonialism,
psychoanalysis,
post-structuralism,
post-modernism,
romanticism, and
Marxism.
History
The
Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known literary works. This Babylonian epic poem arises from stories in the
Sumerian language. Although the Sumerian stories are older (probably dating to at least
2100 B.C.),
it was most likely composed around 1900 BC. The epic deals with themes
of heroism, friendship, loss, and the quest for eternal life.
Different historical periods are reflected in literature. National
and tribal sagas, accounts of the origin of the world and of customs,
and myths which sometimes carry moral or spiritual messages predominate
in the pre-urban eras. The epics of
Homer, dating from the early to middle
Iron age, and the great
Indian epics
of a slightly later period, have more evidence of deliberate literary
authorship, surviving like the older myths through oral tradition for
long periods before being written down.
As a more urban culture developed, academies provided a means of
transmission for speculative and philosophical literature in early
civilizations, resulting in the prevalence of literature in
Ancient China,
Ancient India,
Persia and
Ancient Greece and Rome. Many works of earlier periods, even in narrative form, had a covert moral or didactic purpose, such as the Sanskrit
Panchatantra or the
Metamorphoses of Ovid.
Drama and
satire also developed as urban culture 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.
Over a long period, the poetry of popular pre-literate balladry and
song interpenetrated and eventually influenced poetry in the literary
medium.
In ancient China, early literature was primarily focused on philosophy,
historiography,
military science, agriculture, and
poetry. China, the origin of modern
paper making and
woodblock printing, produced one of the world's first
print cultures.
[1] Much of Chinese literature originates with the
Hundred Schools of Thought period that occurred during the
Eastern Zhou Dynasty (769-269 BCE). The most important of these include the Classics of
Confucianism, of
Daoism, 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 BCE, and attributed to the blind 5th century BCE historian
Zuo Qiuming.
In ancient India, literature originated from stories that were originally orally transmitted. Early genres included
drama,
fables,
sutras and
epic poetry.
Sanskrit literature begins with the
Vedas, dating back to 1500–1000 BCE, and continues with the
Sanskrit Epics of
Iron Age India. The Vedas are among the
oldest sacred texts. The Samhitas (vedic collections) date to roughly 1500–1000 BCE, and the "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the
redaction of the Samhitas, date to c. 1000-500 BCE, resulting in a
Vedic period, spanning the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE, or the
Late Bronze Age and the
Iron Age.
[2]
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.
In ancient Greece, the epics of
Homer, who wrote the
Iliad and the
Odyssey, and
Hesiod, who wrote
Works and Days and
Theogony, are some of the earliest, and most influential, of Ancient Greek literature. Classical Greek genres included philosophy,
poetry, historiography,
comedies and
dramas.
Plato and
Aristotle authored philosophical texts that are the foundation of
Western philosophy,
Sappho and
Pindar were influential
lyrical poets, and
Herodotus and
Thucydides were early Greek historians. Although drama was popular in Ancient Greece, of the hundreds of
tragedies written and performed during the
classical age, only a limited number of plays by three authors still exist:
Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and
Euripides. The plays of
Aristophanes provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as
Old Comedy, the earliest form of Greek Comedy, and are in fact used to define the genre.
[3]
Roman histories and biographies anticipated the extensive mediaeval
literature of lives of saints and miraculous chronicles, but the most
characteristic form of the
Middle Ages was the
romance,
an adventurous and sometimes magical narrative with strong popular
appeal. Controversial, religious, political and instructional literature
proliferated during the Renaissance as a result of the invention of
printing, while the mediaeval romance developed into a more
character-based and psychological form of narrative, the
novel, of which early and important examples are the Chinese
Monkey and the German
Faust books.
In the
Age of Reason
philosophical tracts and speculations on history and human nature
integrated literature with social and political developments. The
inevitable reaction was the explosion of
Romanticism
in the later 18th century which reclaimed the imaginative and
fantastical bias of old romances and folk-literature and asserted the
primacy of individual experience and emotion. But as the 19th-century
went on, European fiction evolved towards
realism and
naturalism,
the meticulous documentation of real life and social trends. Much of
the output of naturalism was implicitly polemical, and influenced social
and political change, but 20th century fiction and drama moved back
towards the subjective, emphasising unconscious motivations and social
and environmental pressures on the individual. Writers such as
Proust,
Eliot,
Joyce,
Kafka and
Pirandello exemplify the trend of documenting internal rather than external realities.
Genre fiction
also showed it could question reality in its 20th century forms, in
spite of its fixed formulas, through the enquiries of the skeptical
detective and the alternative realities of
science fiction.
The separation of "mainstream" and "genre" forms (including journalism)
continued to blur during the period up to our own times.
William Burroughs, in his early works, and
Hunter S. Thompson expanded documentary reporting into strong subjective statements after the
second World War, and
post-modern critics have disparaged the idea of objective realism in general.
Poetry
A
poem is a
composition written in
verse
(although verse has also been used for epic and dramatic fiction).
Poems make use of the aesthetic qualities of language to suggest
differential meanings and to evoke emotive responses. Poems rely heavily
on
imagery and
metaphor; they may have a rhythmic structure based on patterns of stresses (
metric feet) or on patterns of different-length syllables (as in classical
prosody); and they may or may not utilize
rhyme. Due to the diversity of poetic forms and structures,
poetry can be difficult to define and characterize. Typically though, poetry as a form of literature makes use of the
formal properties of the words it uses – the properties of the
written or
spoken
form of the words, independent of their meaning. For example, rhythm
can be established by the number of syllables in the words or how these
syllables are stressed; rhyme and
alliteration depend on the sounds of the words.
Arguably, poetry pre-dates other forms of literature. Early examples include the
Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (dated from around
2700 B.C.), parts of the
Bible, the surviving works of
Homer (the
Iliad and the
Odyssey), and the
Indian epics Ramayana and
Mahabharata. In cultures based primarily on
oral traditions the formal characteristics of poetry often have a
mnemonic function, and important texts: legal,
genealogical or moral, for example, may appear first in verse form.
Some poetry uses specific forms. Examples include the
haiku, the
limerick, and the
sonnet. A traditional haiku written in Japanese relate to
nature,
contain seventeen onji (syllables), distributed over three lines in
groups of five, seven, and five, and should also have a kigo, a specific
word indicating a season. A limerick has five lines, with a
rhyme scheme
of AABBA, and line lengths of 3,3,2,2,3 stressed syllables. It
traditionally has a less reverent attitude towards nature. Poetry not
adhering to a formal poetic structure is called "
free verse".
Language and tradition dictate some poetic norms Persian poetry
always rhymes whilst Greek poetry rarely does. Some languages contain
more rhyming words than others. Italian, for example, has a rich rhyming
structure permitting use of a limited set of rhymes throughout a
lengthy poem. The richness results from word endings that follow regular
forms. English, with its irregular word endings adopted from other
languages, is less rich in rhyme. Perhaps the most
paradigmatic style of English poetry, blank verse, as exemplified in works by
Shakespeare and
Milton, consists of unrhymed
iambic pentameters.
Some languages prefer longer lines; some shorter ones. Some of these
conventions result from the ease of fitting a specific language's
vocabulary and grammar into certain structures, rather than into others;
For example, this may occur when a language typically has longer words
than other languages, such us
Greek and
German.
Other structural conventions come about as the result of historical
accidents, where many speakers of a language associate good poetry with a
verse form preferred by a particular skilled or popular poet.
Works for theatre (see below) traditionally took verse form. This has now become rare outside
opera and
musicals, although many would argue that the language of drama remains intrinsically poetic.
In recent years,
digital poetry has arisen that utilizes the artistic, publishing, and synthetic qualities of digital media.
Essays
An
essay consists of a discussion of a topic from an author's personal point of view, exemplified by works by
Michel de Montaigne or by
Charles Lamb.
"Essay" in English derives from the French word for "to attempt,"
essayer.
[citation needed]
Thus, one can find open-ended, provocative, and inconclusive essays.
The term "essays" first applied to the self-reflective musings of
Michel de Montaigne, who has a reputation as the father of this literary form.
[citation needed]
Genres related to the essay may include:
Early novels in Europe did not count as significant litera perhaps because "mere" prose writing seemed easy and unimportant.
[citation needed]
It has become clear, however, that prose writing can provide aesthetic
pleasure without adhering to poetic forms. Additionally, the freedom
authors gain in not having to concern themselves with verse structure
translates often into a more complex
plot
or into one richer in precise detail than one typically finds even in
narrative poetry. This freedom also allows an author to experiment with
many different literary and presentation styles—including poetry—in the
scope of a single novel.
Other prose literature
Philosophical,
historical,
journalistic, and
scientific
writings are traditionally ranked as literature. They offer some of the
oldest prose writings in existence; novels and prose stories earned the
names "
fiction" to distinguish them from factual writing or
nonfiction, which writers historically have crafted in prose.
Natural science
As advances and specialization have made new scientific research
inaccessible to most audiences, the "literary" nature of science writing
has become less pronounced over the last two centuries. Now, science
appears mostly in
journals. Scientific works of
Aristotle,
Copernicus, and
Newton
still exhibit great value, but since the science in them has largely
become outdated, they no longer serve for scientific instruction. Yet,
they remain too technical to sit well in most programmes of literary
study. Outside of "
history of science" programmes, students rarely read such works.
Philosophy
Philosophy has become an increasingly academic discipline. More of
its practitioners lament this situation than occurs with the sciences;
nonetheless most new philosophical work appears in
academic journals. Major philosophers through history—
Plato,
Aristotle, Socrates,
Augustine,
Descartes,
Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche—have
become as canonical as any writers. Some recent philosophy works are
argued to merit the title "literature", such as some of the works by
Simon Blackburn; but much of it does not, and some areas, such as
logic, have become extremely technical to a degree similar to that of
mathematics.
History
A significant portion of historical writing ranks as literature, particularly the genre known as
creative nonfiction. So can a great deal of journalism, such as
literary journalism.
However these areas have become extremely large, and often have a
primarily utilitarian purpose: to record data or convey immediate
information. As a result the writing in these fields often lacks a
literary quality, although it often and in its better moments has that
quality. Major "literary" historians include
Herodotus,
Thucydides and
Procopius, all of whom count as canonical literary figures.
Law
Law offers more ambiguity. Some writings of
Plato and
Aristotle, the law tables of
Hammurabi of
Babylon, or even the early parts of the
Bible could be seen as legal literature.
Roman civil law as codified in the
Corpus Juris Civilis during the reign of
Justinian I of the
Byzantine Empire has a reputation as significant literature. The founding documents of many countries, including
Constitutions and
Law Codes, can count as literature; however, most legal writings rarely exhibit much literary merit, as they tend to be rather
garrulous.
Drama
A
play or
drama is another classical literary form that has continued to evolve over the years. It generally comprises chiefly
dialogue between
characters, and usually aims at dramatic / theatrical
performance (see
theatre) rather than at reading. During the 18th and 19th centuries,
opera developed as a combination of poetry, drama, and
music. Nearly all drama took verse form until comparatively recently. Shakespeare could be considered drama.
Romeo and Juliet, for example, is a classic romantic drama generally accepted as literature.
Greek drama exemplifies the earliest form of drama of which we have substantial knowledge.
Tragedy, as a dramatic
genre, developed as a performance associated with
religious and civic
festivals, typically enacting or developing upon well-known
historical or
mythological themes. Tragedies generally presented very serious
themes. With the advent of newer technologies, scripts written for non-stage media have been added to this form.
War of the Worlds (radio)
in 1938 saw the advent of literature written for radio broadcast, and
many works of Drama have been adapted for film or television.
Conversely, television, film, and radio literature have been adapted to
printed or electronic media.
Oral literature
The term
oral literature refers not to written, but to oral tradition, folktales, and
ballads. However the use of this
oxymoron is controversial in the scientific community. Some prefer to avoid the
Etyme.
Other narrative forms
- Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works that originate in digital environments.
- Films, videos and broadcast soap operas have carved out a niche which often parallels the functionality of prose fiction.
- Graphic novels and comic books present stories told in a combination of sequential artwork, dialogue and text.
Genres of literature
Literary genre is a mode of categorising literature. The term originates from French, designating a proposed type or class.
[4] However, such classes are subject to change, and have been used in different ways in different periods and traditions.
Literary techniques
A
literary technique or
literary device can be used by
authors in order to enhance the written framework of a piece of
literature, and produce specific effects. Literary techniques encompass a
wide range of approaches to crafting a work: whether a work is narrated
in
first-person or from another perspective, whether to use a traditional linear narrative or a
nonlinear narrative, or the choice of
literary genre,
are all examples of literary technique. They may indicate to a reader
that there is a familiar structure and presentation to a work, such as a
conventional
murder-mystery novel; or, the author may choose to experiment with their technique to surprise the reader.
In this way, use of a technique can lead to the development of a new
genre, as was the case with one of the first modern novels,
Pamela by
Samuel Richardson.
Pamela is written as a collection of letter-writing correspondence, called "epistolary technique"; by using this technique,
Pamela strengthened the tradition of the
epistolary novel, a genre which had been practiced for some time already but without the same acclaim.
Literary technique is distinguished from
literary device, as
military strategy is distinguished from
military tactics. Devices are specific constructions within the narrative that make it effective. Examples include
metaphor,
simile,
ellipsis, narrative
motifs, and
allegory. Even simple
word play functions as a literary device. The
narrative mode may be considered a literary device, such as the use of
stream-of-consciousness narrative.
Literary criticism implies a critique and evaluation of a piece of
literature and, in some cases, it is used to improve a work in progress
or a classical piece, as with an ongoing theatre production.
Literary editors
can serve a similar purpose for the authors with whom they work. There
are many types of literary criticism and each can be used to critique a
piece in a different way or critique a different aspect of a piece.
Legal status
UK
Literary works have been protected by copyright law from unauthorised reproduction since at least 1710.
[5] Literary works are defined by copyright law to mean
any
work, other than a dramatic or musical work, which is written, spoken
or sung, and accordingly includes (a) a table or compilation (other than
a database), (b) a computer program, (c) preparatory design material
for a computer program, and (d) a database.
It should be noted that literary works are not limited to works of
literature, but include all works expressed in print or writing (other
than dramatic or musical works).
[6]
