Literature

• 1. Introduction

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  Literature is any collection of written work, and yet that simple definition has never held still. Before the 18th century in Western Europe, the word denoted all books and writing of any kind. The 1910 to 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica narrowed it sharply, calling literature the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing. The word itself comes from the Latin litteratura, meaning learning, writing, and grammar, and originally writing formed with letters, from littera, a letter. So how did a term rooted entirely in the alphabet come to embrace songs no one ever wrote down? Why are some texts banned for a decade and then taught in classrooms worldwide? And what makes a fictional character on a page matter to a psychologist or a minority student? The answers run from volcanoes that erupted forty thousand years ago to a single Swedish industrialist's will.

• 2. The Voice Before The Letter

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  Australian Aboriginal culture has passed oral traditions and histories down across tens of thousands of years. A study published in February 2020 showed that the Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago. That figure is described as a minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria. It also lends weight to the oral histories of the Gunditjmara people of south-western Victoria, which recall volcanic eruptions and rank among the oldest oral traditions in existence. An axe found beneath volcanic ash in 1947 had already shown humans lived in the region before Tower Hill erupted.

  Oral literature is called an ancient human tradition found in all corners of the world. The Judeo-Christian Bible reveals its oral roots, medieval European manuscripts were penned by performing scribes, and geometric vases from archaic Greece mirror Homer's oral style. One sweeping claim holds that oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species, both as historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality. The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, used to remember history, genealogy, and law.

  In ancient India, folklore, mythologies, and scriptures across different religions passed by oral tradition, preserved with precision through elaborate mnemonic techniques. The scholar Goody argued that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have survived orally alone, calling it a parallel product of a literate society. Homer's epic poetry, states Michael Gagarin, was largely composed, performed, and transmitted orally. Singers swapped the names in their stories for local characters or rulers to give them a local flavor, which made the embedded history unreliable.

  Writing systems are not known to have existed among Native North Americans north of Mesoamerica before contact with Europeans. Most of their stories functioned as practical lessons drawn from tribal experience, applied to moral, social, psychological, and environmental issues. Social pressure could be exerted without causing direct embarrassment or exclusion. Rather than yelling, Inuit parents might keep children from the water's edge by telling a story about a sea monster with a pouch for children within its reach.

• 3. Stone, Clay, And Verse

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  Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory. Writing became a more dependable way to record transactions in permanent form. In ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, writing may have emerged from the need to record historical and environmental events. Ancient Egyptian literature, along with Sumerian literature, is considered among the world's oldest, with primary Egyptian genres written almost entirely in verse.

  The Old Kingdom, spanning the 26th to 22nd centuries BC, produced funerary texts, epistles, hymns, poems, and commemorative autobiographies recounting the careers of administrative officials. A narrative Egyptian literature did not appear until the early Middle Kingdom, between the 21st and 17th centuries BC. The Sanskrit Panchatantra, dated 200 BC to 300 AD, carried a covert moral purpose drawn from older oral tradition.

  In ancient China, early literature focused on philosophy, historiography, military science, agriculture, and poetry. China, the origin of modern paper making and woodblock printing, produced the world's first print cultures. Much of its literature originates with the Hundred Schools of Thought during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, dated 769 to 269 BC. Sun Tzu's The Art of War dates to around the 5th century BC, and Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian to roughly 94 BC. The Zuo Zhuan, a narrative history compiled no later than 389 BC, is attributed to the blind 5th-century historian Zuo Qiuming.

  Sanskrit literature begins with the Vedas, dating back to 1500 to 1000 BC, among the oldest sacred texts. Between roughly the 6th and 1st centuries BC came the composition of the two most influential Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, with redaction continuing to the 4th century AD. The earliest Greek writings are Mycenaean, dated around 1600 to 1100 BC, written in the Linear B syllabary on clay tablets. Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, who deciphered Linear B, found those tablets held only trade records, no real literature.

• 4. Homer And The Holy Books

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  Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are central works of ancient Greek literature, generally placed around the late eighth or early seventh century BC. To Plato, Homer was simply the one who has taught Greece, ten Hellada pepaideuken. Hesiod's Works and Days, around 700 BC, and his Theogony are among the earliest and most influential Greek works. Plato, dated 428 or 427 to 348 or 347 BC, and Aristotle, 384 to 322 BC, wrote the texts regarded as the foundation of Western philosophy. Of the hundreds of tragedies performed in the classical age, only plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides survive.

  The Hebrew Torah is widely seen as a product of the Persian period, dated 539 to 333 BC and probably 450 to 350 BC. A traditional Jewish view gives Ezra, leader of the community returning from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation. Roman literature dates to 240 BC, when a Roman audience first saw a Latin version of a Greek play. Literature in Latin then flourished for six centuries.

  The Qur'an, dated 610 to 632 AD, is the main holy book of Islam and marked the beginning of Islamic literature. Muslims believe it was transcribed in the Arabic dialect of the Quraysh, the tribe of Muhammad. As Islam spread, the Qur'an unified and standardized Arabic. Religion has had a major influence on literature through works like the Vedas, the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran. The King James Version of the Bible has been called the most influential version of the most influential book in the world. The atheist Richard Dawkins added that a native English speaker who has never read a word of it is verging on the barbarian.

• 5. The Machine That Multiplied Books

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  The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware around 1045, and it later spread to Korea. Around 1230, Koreans invented a metal type movable printing, which reached Europe between the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in Europe, making books cheaper to produce and far more widely available. The Medieval romance developed into the novel as religious, political, and instructional works proliferated during the European Renaissance.

  Early printed books, single sheets, and images created before 1501 in Europe are known as incunables or incunabula. One striking measure of the change runs like this: a man born in 1453, the year Constantinople fell, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed. That was more, perhaps, than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in 330 AD.

  Printing eventually enabled forms of publishing beyond books. The history of newspaper publishing began in Germany in 1609, with magazines following in 1663. Before printing, distributed works were copied manually by scribes, a labor the press finally rendered obsolete.

• 6. Who Gets To Write

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  The widespread education of women was not common until the nineteenth century, so until recently literature was mostly male dominated. Few English-language women poets are remembered before the twentieth century, though the nineteenth gave us Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson. Jane Austen, dated 1775 to 1817, is the first major English woman novelist, while Aphra Behn is an early female dramatist.

  Amantine Dupin, dated 1804 to 1876, is the notable exception to women's absence from the European canon of Romantic literature. Writing under the pen name George Sand, she was more renowned in England in the 1830s and 1840s than both Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac. Nobel Prizes in Literature awarded between 1901 and 2020 went to 117 individuals, 101 men and 16 women. Selma Lagerlof, dated 1858 to 1940, was the first woman to win it, in 1909, and the first woman granted membership in The Swedish Academy, in 1914.

  A separate genre of children's literature only began to emerge in the eighteenth century, alongside the developing concept of childhood. The earliest such books were educational works, books on conduct, and simple ABCs, often decorated with animals, plants, and anthropomorphic letters. In late 1820s England, growing political awareness among the utilitarians and Benthamites promoted the idea of including English literary study at the newly formed London University, cast as the ideal carrier for a vision of a well educated, culturally harmonious nation.

• 7. Forms On The Page

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  Poetry has traditionally been set apart by its musical devices, including assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm, and by being arranged in lines and verses rather than paragraphs. Abram Lipsky called it an open secret that prose is not distinguished from poetry by lack of rhythm. As a form, poetry may pre-date literacy, sustained by oral tradition, which makes it the earliest example of literature.

  The poet T.S. Eliot suggested that while the distinction between verse and prose is clear, the distinction between poetry and prose is obscure. Eugene Onegin, published in 1831 by Alexander Pushkin, is the most famous verse novel, a novel-length narrative told through poetry. Latin shaped the development of prose across Europe and remained the lingua franca among literate Europeans until recent times. The works of Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Baruch Spinoza were published in Latin, as were late scientific books by Swedenborg, Linnaeus, Euler, Gauss, and Isaac Newton.

  A novel is a long fictional narrative, usually in prose, and the term emerged from the Romance languages in the late 15th century with the meaning of news. Walter Scott defined the romance as a fictitious narrative turning on marvelous and uncommon incidents, while the novel accommodates events to the ordinary train of human life. The publisher Melville House calls the novella too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, typically between 17,000 and 40,000 words. Drama is literature intended for performance, and nearly all drama took verse form until comparatively recently.

• 8. Power Over The Page

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  Copyright gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time. It protects the original expression of an idea, not the idea itself. In the United Kingdom, literary works have been protected from unauthorized reproduction since at least 1710. United States copyright was established as federal law with the Copyright Act of 1790, updated many times including a major revision in 1976.

  Japan was a party to the original Berne convention in 1899, which protected works for 50 years after an author's death. In 2004, Japan extended that to 70 years for cinematographic works, and at the end of 2018, following Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, the 70-year term applied to all works. The change was not retroactive, so works that entered the public domain between 1999 and 2018 stayed there.

  Censorship is used by states, religious organizations, and educational institutions to control what can be written or performed. James Joyce's novel Ulysses, called a divine work of art by Vladimir Nabokov, was banned in the United States from 1921 until 1933 on grounds of obscenity. Today it is a central text in English literature courses worldwide. The very best in literature is recognized each year by the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of six prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, honoring the author whose work points, in Nobel's words, in an ideal direction.