literature

In its simplest definition literature is a body of written works. However, 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. Literature may be classified according to a variety of systems, including language, national origin, historical period, genre, and subject matter.

(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Kenneth Rexroth.)

Definitions of the word literature tend to be circular. The 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary considers literature to be “writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.” The 19th-century critic Walter Pater referred to “the matter of imaginative or artistic literature” as a “transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinitely varied forms.” But such definitions assume that the reader already knows what literature is. And indeed its central meaning, at least, is clear enough. Deriving from the Latin littera, “a letter of the alphabet,” literature is first and foremost humankind’s entire body of writing; after that it is the body of writing belonging to a given language or people; then it is individual pieces of writing.

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But already it is necessary to qualify these statements. To use the word writing when describing literature is itself misleading, for one may speak of oral literature or “the literature of preliterate peoples.” The art of literature is not reducible to the words on the page; they are there solely because of the craft of writing. As an art, literature might be described as the organization of words to give pleasure. Yet through words literature elevates and transforms experience beyond “mere” pleasure. Literature also functions more broadly in society as a means of both criticizing and affirming cultural values.

The scope of literature

Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in words—even when organized and written down—is counted as literature. Those writings that are primarily informative—technical, scholarly, journalistic—have been excluded from the rank of literature by most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all.

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Literary Hodgepodge

The purest (or, at least, the most intense) literary form is the lyric poem, and after it comes elegiac, epic, dramatic, narrative, and expository verse. Most theories of literary criticism base themselves on an analysis of poetry, because the aesthetic problems of literature are there presented in their simplest and purest form. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at all but verse. Many novels—certainly all the world’s great novels—are literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. Most great dramas are considered literature.

The Greeks thought of history as one of the seven arts, inspired by a goddess, the muse Clio. All of the world’s classic surveys of history can stand as noble examples of the art of literature, but most historical works and studies today are not written primarily with literary excellence in mind, though they may possess it, as it were, by accident.

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The essay was once written deliberately as a piece of literature; its subject matter was of comparatively minor importance. Today many essays are written as expository, informative journalism, although there are modern essayists in the great tradition who are regarded as artists, such as George Orwell, James Baldwin, and Zadie Smith. Now, as in the past, some of the greatest essayists are critics of literature, drama, and the arts, although many just as well dissect such varied topics as politics, religion, personal identity, the perfect cup of tea, generational humor, and writing itself.

Some personal documents (autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and letters) rank among the world’s greatest literature. Some examples of this biographical literature were written with posterity in mind, others with no thought of their being read by anyone but the writer. Some are in a highly polished literary style; others, couched in a privately evolved language, win their standing as literature because of their cogency, insight, depth, and scope.

Many works of philosophy are classified as literature. The Dialogues of Plato (4th century bce) are written with great narrative skill and in the finest prose; the Meditations of the 2nd-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are a collection of apparently random thoughts, and the Greek in which they are written is eccentric. Yet both are classified as literature, while the speculations of many other philosophers, ancient and modern, are not.

Certain scientific works endure as literature long after their scientific content has become outdated. This is particularly true of books of natural history, where the element of personal observation is of special importance. An excellent example is Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789).

Oratory, the art of persuasion, was long considered a great literary art. The oratory of Native Americans, for instance, is famous, while in Classical Greece, Polymnia was the muse sacred to poetry and oratory. Rome’s great orator Cicero was to have a decisive influence on the development of English prose style. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863) and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963) are known to every American schoolchild. Today, however, oratory is more usually thought of as a craft than as an art.

Most critics would not admit advertising copywriting, purely commercial fiction, cinema and television scripts, song lyrics, or comic books as accepted forms of literary expression, although others would hotly dispute their exclusion. The test in individual cases would seem to be one of enduring satisfaction and, of course, truth. Others have argued that it is not so much what has been excluded from definitions of literature but who. Is the literary canon—the so-called “great works”—too narrow, too focused on the achievements of white European men? Whose voices have been ignored or muted, and what does this mean for how we assess the value of a piece of writing? Such questions are at the center of many debates in the 21st century.

Indeed, it has become more and more difficult to categorize literature in many respects, for in modern civilization words are everywhere. Humans are subject to a continuous flood of communication. Most of it is fugitive, but here and there—in high-level journalism, in television, in cinema, in commercial fiction, in westerns and detective stories, in romance and science-fiction novels, in children’s books, in blogs and social media posts, and in plain, expository prose—some writing, almost by accident, achieves an aesthetic satisfaction, a depth and relevance that entitle it to stand with other examples of the art of literature.