Noun

Singular literature

Plural literatures

literature (plural literatures)

1. The body of all written works.
2. The collected creative writing of a nation, people, group, or culture.
3. All the papers, treatises, etc. published in academic journals on a particular subject.
4. Written fiction of a high standard.

   SF is rarely literature because the characters are so poorly realised. - Adam Cadre

Meronyms

• See also Wikisaurus:literature

Related terms

• letter
• literal
• literacy
• literate
• literary

Literature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter), and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters (as in the phrase "Arts and Letters"). In Western culture the most basic written literary types include fiction and nonfiction.

Definitions

People may perceive a difference between "literature" and some popular forms of written work. The terms "literary fiction" and "literary merit" often serve to distinguish between individual works. Critics may exclude works from the classification "literature," for example, on the grounds of a poor standard of grammar and syntax, of an unbelievable or disjointed story-line, or of inconsistent or unconvincing characters. Genre fiction (for example: romance, crime, or science fiction) may also become excluded from consideration as "literature."

Quotes regarding Literature

Contents

• 1 Sourced
  • 1.1 Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 Misattributed
• 4 External links

Sourced

• That doesn't matter. Don't you give up on this [library] card. Because books can be solid gold. Yeah, the great ones have gotten us through the nights for centuries. Just give a writer an hour to hook you and if he can't wish him the best of luck and find someone else.
  • Anthony Hopkins, Hearts in Atlantis movie

• La literatura es una batalla silenciosa en la que uno ha de ganar, o de perder; palmo a palmo, un territorio quo no es suyo con armas que no le pertenecen.

(Literature is a silent battle in which everyone has to win or lose, a territory that is not yours, not with weapons that belong to him.)

• Juan José Millás

• When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.
  • George Saintsbury, A Last Vintage, p. 172

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• A beautiful literature springs from the depth and fullness of intellectual and moral life, from an energy of thought and feeling, to which nothing, as we believe, ministers so largely as enlightened religion.
  • William Ellery Channing, p. 385.

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Wed Oct 21 13:01:06 2009