Literature
Literature broadly is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to included oral literature, much of which has been transcribed.
Six common themes in literature are:
- Good vs. evil
- Love
- Redemption
- Courage and perseverance
- Coming of age
- Revenge
Literature, a body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose, distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. It allows a person to step back in time and learn about life on Earth from the ones who walked before us. We can gather a better understanding of culture and have a greater appreciation of them. We learn through the way's history is recorded, in the forms of manuscripts and through speech itself. The purpose of literature is often viewed as a collection of made-up stories, designed to entertain us, to amuse us, or to simply provide us with an escape from the 'real' world.
Reading literature will help you learn style, punctuation, grammar, plot, description, and everything else. Absorbing as much good literature as possible helps you find your place as a writer and offers endless sources of inspiration for how to craft sentences, characters, and whole entire worlds to play in. At the most basic level, there are essentially three main genres for literature - poetry, prose and drama and each can be broken down even further, resulting in dozens of subgenres for each. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction, and whether it is poetry or prose. It can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama, and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).
Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world’s earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th millennium BC; taken to include spoken or sung texts, it originated even earlier, and some of the first written works may have been based on a pre-existing oral tradition. As urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of literature. Developments in print technology allowed for literature to be distributed and experienced on an unprecedented scale, which has culminated in the twenty-first century in electronic literature.
Ancient literature comprises religious and scientific documents, tales, poetry and plays, royal edicts and declarations, and other forms of writing that were recorded on a variety of media, including stone, stone tablets, papyri, palm leaves, and metal. Before the spread of writing, oral literature did not always survive well, though some texts and fragments have persisted. One can conclude that an unknown number of written works too have likely not survived the ravages of time and are therefore lost. August Nitschke sees some fairy tales as literary survivals dating back to Ice Age and Stone Age narrators.
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