![]() 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. ![]() The Greeks thought of history as one of the seven arts, inspired by a goddess, the muse Clio. Most great dramas are considered literature (although the Chinese, possessors of one of the world’s greatest dramatic traditions, consider their plays, with few exceptions, to possess no literary merit whatsoever). Many novels-certainly all the world’s great novels-are literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at all but 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. 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. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art. Those writings that are primarily informative-technical, scholarly, journalistic-would be excluded from the rank of literature by most, though not all, critics. But not everything expressed in words-even when organized and written down-is counted as literature. Literature is a form of human expression. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica The scope of literature Literature also functions more broadly in society as a means of both criticizing and affirming cultural values. Yet through words literature elevates and transforms experience beyond “mere” pleasure. ![]() As an art, literature might be described as the organization of words to give pleasure. 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. ( A Britannica Publishing Partner) See all videos for this articleīut already it is necessary to qualify these statements. Displayed by permission of The Regents of the University of California. Learn how an encounter with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar during an 18-month solitary confinement started Clinton Terrell on a path from prison to the University of California, Berkeley.
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