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African Literature - MSN Encarta (1909 words) |
 | Africa’s oral literature takes the form of prose, verse, and proverb, and texts vary in length from the epic, which might be performed over the course of several days, to single-sentence formulations such as the proverb. |
| Literatures in African languages have received little scholarly attention, in part because of a Western bias in favor of literature in European languages. |
| Literature in Somali is predominantly in verse, and its greatest figure is Sayyid Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan, who was born in the mid-19th century and died in 1921. |
| The Art of Literature (Rexroth's Encyclopaedia Britannica article) (9873 words) |
| To use the word writing when describing literature is itself misleading, for one may rightly 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 because of the craft of writing. |
| Literature, like music, is an art of time, or “tempo”: it takes time to read or listen to, and it usually presents events or the development of ideas or the succession of images or all these together in time. |
| Popular literature today is produced either to be read by a literate audience or to be enacted on television or in the cinema; it is produced by writers who are members, however lowly, of an elite corps of professional literates. |
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