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Top Literature - Portal:Literature (999 words) |
 | 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 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 Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, although the oldest literary texts that have come down to us date to a full millennium after the invention of writing, to the late 3rd millennium BC. |
| French Literature (287 words) |
| Throughout the period, literature was shaped by specific historical traditions and a firmly circumscribed code of priorities, ecclesiastical and secular. |
| The dominance of the Church ensured that literary expression was informed by a strong didactic spirit, while feudalism provided a common, if loose, framework of values until it was challenged in the thirteenth century by the growth of towns and a less courtly and more bourgeois public. |
| Though the existence of a tripartite social hierarchy (clergy, aristocracy and the rest) might suggest separate literary constituencies, the notion of a ‘public’ for literature is difficult to define. |
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