Literature is literally "an acquaintance with
letters", as in the first sense given in the
Oxford English Dictionary (from the
Latin littera meaning "an individual written character"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of
texts or
works of art, which in Western culture are mainly
prose, both
fiction and
non-fiction,
drama and
poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be
oral as well, and include such
genres as
epic,
legend,
myth,
ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and the
folktale. The word "literature" as a common noun can refer to any form of writing, such as
essays; "Literature" as a proper noun refers to a whole body of literary work.
The history of literature begins with the history of writing, in the Bronze Age of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, although the oldest literary texts date to a full millennium after the invention of writing, to the late 3rd millennium BC. The earliest literary authors known by name are Ptahhotep and Enheduanna, dating to ca. the 24th and 23rd centuries BC, respectively.
More about Literature...
... that Henry Denker's play about Sigmund Freud (pictured), A Far Country, premiered on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre in 1961, and that Curd Jürgens played Freud in a 1979 German language production at the Theater in der Josefstadt, Vienna?
... that Lawrence Ferlinghetti's best-known collection of poetry is entitled A Coney Island of the Mind?
... that Cordelia Grey, Kate Brannigan, Bertha Cool, V. I. Warshawski, Tally McGinnis (created by Nancy Sanra), and Precious Ramotswe are female private investigators?
... that Nils Holgersson is a boy who takes great delight in hurting the animals on his father's farm?
... that U.S. literary critic Leslie Fiedler was one of the first to question the notion of a gap between "high art" and popular art", in his 1972 book, Cross the Border—Close the Gap?
... that during her lifetime two plays were written about Mary Frith, an English pickpocket?
... that The Doors took their name from the title of a book by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, a phrase which was in turn borrowed from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?
