Literature/Citable Version
Literature, in its most basic sense a body of "letters" (from the Latin litteras), refers generally to a body of written texts in any or or human languages. By extension the term has also been applied to spoken texts ("oral literature") or to a body of writings on a particular subject area (e.g., "medical literature"), or other collections of material in a given language or national tradition ("English literature"). Literature is often divided into historical periods ("Victorian literature") as well as into formal categories (prose, poetry, or drama) and genres (such as the Epic, the Novel, or the folktale).
Introduction
In its broadest sense, Literature came into being with the first use of pictographic or alphabetic scripts, although it is more common to separate out as "literature" only those texts which contain a degree of imaginative, didactic, or descriptive content. Thus, business records, tallies, or lists are not generally included, although such texts can be found in the earliest civilizations. Religious texts, while they have of course an entirely different significance to the adherents of the faiths to which they pertain, may also be considered "as" literature when their narrative or compositional qualities are foregrounded. The earliest instances of literature, therefore, include a variety of texts ranging from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Torah to the Odyssey of Homer. These texts, though recognized as literature, share an origin in pre-literate cultures, and thus predate in some sense the modern use of the term. Later in human history, the deliberate writing of imaginary or fanciful texts, disseminated in written form to a literate audience, marks the first fully self-conscious literary traditions; in this era might be placed such compositions as Virgil's Aeneid, the Chinese Songs of Chu, or the lyric poetry of Sappho. With improvements in the production and dissemination of written texts, from Roman copyhouses to the invention of the printing press, along with the increase of a literate reading public, a third sense of "literature," and the one most commonly used today, came into being. Specifically, literature today encompasses all imaginative writing in any modern language, as well as essays, criticism, travel writing, biographies, memoirs, and collections of letters.
With the advent of new media and technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, texts are often stored and transmitted without ever being printed on paper; they also often include or are linked to audio, video, or multimedia content. Speech can now also be recorded. stored, and transmitted, such that some literary historians such as Walter J. Ong regard this as an age of "secondary orality". Such changes will doubtless expand and alter the definition of literature, just as did earlier technological developments.
Formal categories
The most fundamental division common to most formal distinctions is that between poetry and prose. The precise distinction between these two categories varies somewhat among world literatures, though it may generally be observed that poetry depends upon a relatively fixed array of metrical and phonological patterns, as on a more densely interconnected arrangement of imagery and metaphor. In Old English poetry, as in the earliest Latin verse, a fixed number of metrical beats, with the alliteration of initial sounds, provide the basic structure, whereas in ancient Greek poetry, the length of the syllables was the primary principle. Rhyme, the assonance of the final sounds of words or lines, is also a very common poetic structure. Prose, of course, may partake of all these qualities as well, though generally not in such a dense and closely patterned manner. Modern poetry also includes forms such as free verse and concrete poetry, which depart from the strict poetic meter or earlier forms, or attempt to abandon formal contraints altogether.
Prose is a far more inclusive category, and indeed includes a wide variety of texts, such as business letters, instruction manuals, and newpapers, which may not be considered literature at all. The earliest epic narratives were poetic in form, and prose was more generally reserved for the writing of history, religious instruction, or descriptive accounts of events or travels. Literary prose first emerged in the later Middle Ages, in texts such as Bocaccio's Decameron, or the prose segments of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales such as the Tale of Melibee, which Chaucer himself describes as "a litel thing in prose". By the time of the Renaissance, literary prose tended to take the form of extended essays, such as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or in narratives now regarded as early antecedents of the Novel such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. From the eighteenth century onward, literary prose has largely been comprised either of narrative fiction or of essays, along with collections of personal letters, biography, and autobiography.
Genres
The evolution of various genres of literature has varied considerably in different languages and cultures, although some very general categories can be outlined. Much early imaginative literature can be classed as Epic; within this category one would find texts as various as the Odyssey, the Finnish Kalevala, the Elder Edda, or the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Epic literature is marked by a strong, central narrative, often focused on the deeds of a single heroic figure, and featuring elaborately detailed accounts of battle. The Greek term lyric also has close equivalents in many world literatures; lyric poetry is generally written in short stanzas or strophes, with an emphasis on image and affective emotion. Significant lyric poets in world traditions have included Sappho, Li Po, Kabir, Keats, and Dickinson.
Another early and continuing form, Dramatic literature, consists of words and actions to be spoken and performed upon a stage by actors; while it has often been recorded in writing and print, the primary venue for this form of literature is theatrical performance. In ancient Greece, where plays evolved out of the religious observances of Dionysus, the works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others retain their force after two millenia. Significant world playwrights include Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett. Some of the paradigms of the stage extend to those of cinema film, and today film studies are often conjoined academically with the study of literature.
In the past few centuries, the Novel has emerged as one of the dominant literary forms of modern literature, combining some features of the Epic (such as a strong, central protagonist) with elements of historical narrative, travel writing, and the naturalistic dialogue of plays. Many claim Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) as the first novel, though some assign it instead to the category of Mock Epic. Among the great practitioners of the novel over the centuries since have been Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner. Novels themselves, from their first appearance, have been categorized in a variety of topical or formal sub-genres, such as the Picaresque novel or the Epistolary Novel, as well as broader thematic categories such as Science Fiction, Detective Fiction, or Fantasy.
National literatures
Although their names imply otherwise, national literatures often emerged before or after the emergence of modern nation-states. Dante, famously, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, his defense of writing in Italian, declared that literary Italian must be "curial", or "of the manner of the Italian court"" - even though, at the time he wrote there was no such singular Italian state. Like Chaucer and other medieval poets, he wrote before the language of his compositions reached its modern form. The writers of the Renaissance were a vital part of the emergence of their respective national literatures, though some, like Sir Thomas More, eschewed their own vernacular in favor of Latin. Even writers whose works now seem essential to their national literature, such as Goethe or Shakespeare, only became legitimate subjects of serious academic consideration very late in the twentieth century, when national vernacular literatures became subjects for schools and universities. Today, at a point when literary works are frequently translated into other languages soon after their publication, and literacy rates around the world are at historic highs, there is a growing sense of an international audience for literature. In addition, as writers from colonized areas take up the languages of their former colonizers, Postcolonial literature has emerged as a significant area of new writing.
References
- Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
- Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002)