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, didcatic, 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