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Article: Literature
- Article from:
- International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
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Literature
BEGINNINGS
MODERN DEFINITION
AESTHETICS AND NATIONALISM
THE CANON AND BEYOND
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The word
literature
can simply mean a body of published texts, as in,
“
Are you familiar with the literature on global warming?
”
In a more restrictive sense, it alludes to creative works of the imagination. Conventionally these are divided into poetry, drama, and fiction. This concept of literature is a relatively recent one, first used in the late eighteenth century.
BEGINNINGS
The English word
literature
derives from the Latin
litteratura
, from
littera
(a letter of the alphabet). Most European languages
—
Romance, Germanic, and Slavic
—
have direct Latin ...