1.
Literature
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Literature, in its broadest sense, is any single body of written works. Its Latin root literatura/litteratura was used to refer to all written accounts, developments in print technology have allowed an evergrowing distribution and proliferation of written works, culminating in electronic literature. There have been attempts to define literature. Simon and Delyse Ryan begin their attempt to answer the question What is Literature, with the observation, The quest to discover a definition for literature is a road that is much travelled, though the point of arrival, if ever reached, is seldom satisfactory. Most attempted definitions are broad and vague, and they change over time. In fact, the thing that is certain about defining literature is that the definition will change. Concepts of what is literature change over time as well, definitions of literature have varied over time, it is a culturally relative definition. In Western Europe prior to the century, literature as a term indicated all books. A more restricted sense of the term emerged during the Romantic period, contemporary debates over what constitutes literature can be seen as returning to the older, more inclusive notion of what constitutes literature. Cultural studies, for instance, takes as its subject of both popular and minority genres, in addition to canonical works. The value judgment definition of literature considers it to cover exclusively those writings that possess high quality or distinction and this sort of definition is that used in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition when it classifies literature as the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing. The formalist definition is that literature foregrounds poetic effects, it is the literariness or poetic of literature that distinguishes it from ordinary speech or other kinds of writing. Etymologically, the term derives from Latin literatura/litteratura learning, a writing, grammar, originally writing formed with letters, in spite of this, the term has also been applied to spoken or sung texts. Poetry is a form of art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of. Possibly as a result of Aristotles influence, poetry before the century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition, novel, a long fictional prose narrative. It was the close relation to real life that differentiated it from the chivalric romance, in most European languages the equivalent term is roman. In English, the term emerged from the Romance languages in the fifteenth century, with the meaning of news, it came to indicate something new
2.
Novel
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A novel is any relatively long piece of written narrative fiction, normally in prose, and typically published as a book. The genre has also described as possessing, a continuous. This view sees the novels origins in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, the latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. The romance is a closely related long prose narrative, Romance, as defined here, should not be confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel, a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, a novel is a long, fictional narrative which describes intimate human experiences. Most European languages use the word romance for extended narratives, fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion, historians would also invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the hand, depict the social, political and personal realities of a place and period with clarity. Even in the 19th century, fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord Byrons Don Juan, Alexander Pushkins Yevgeniy Onegin, vikram Seths The Golden Gate, composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of the verse novel. Both in 12th-century Japan and 15th-century Europe, prose fiction created intimate reading situations, on the other hand, verse epics, including the Odyssey and Aeneid, had been recited to a select audiences, though this was a more intimate experience than the performance of plays in theaters. A new world of Individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, conduct and gallantry spread with novels, the novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the novella, short story, and flash fiction. However, in the 17th century critics saw the romance as of epic length, the length of a novel can still be important because most literary awards use length as a criterion in the ranking system. Urbanization and the spread of printed books in Song Dynasty China led to the evolution of oral storytelling into consciously fictional novels by the Ming dynasty, parallel European developments did not occur for centuries, and awaited the time when the availability of paper allowed for similar opportunities. By contrast, Ibn Tufails Hayy ibn Yaqdhan and Ibn al-Nafis Theologus Autodidactus are works of didactic philosophy, in this sense, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan would be considered an early example of a philosophical novel, while Theologus Autodidactus would be considered an early theological novel. Epic poetry exhibits some similarities with the novel, and the Western tradition of the novel back into the field of verse epics. Then at the beginning of the 18th century, French prose translations brought Homers works to a wider public, longus is the author of the famous Greek novel, Daphnis and Chloe. Romance or chivalric romance is a type of narrative in prose or verse popular in the circles of High Medieval. In later romances, particularly those of French origin, there is a tendency to emphasize themes of courtly love
3.
Poetry
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Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotles Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on such as repetition, verse form and rhyme. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a creative act employing language. Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of such as metaphor, simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm. Some poetry types are specific to cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing, among other things, in todays increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages. Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy, others, however, suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing. The oldest surviving poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe, other forms of poetry developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in poetics—the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as Chinas through her Shijing, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance, Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Later aestheticians identified three major genres, epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry, Aristotles work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic Negative Capability and this romantic approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic
4.
Drama
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Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning action, which is derived from I do, the two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. They are symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia, Thalia was the Muse of comedy, while Melpomene was the Muse of tragedy. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the mode has been contrasted with the epic. The use of drama in a narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the modern era. Drama in this sense refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example and it is this narrower sense that the film and television industries, along with film studies, adopted to describe drama as a genre within their respective media. Radio drama has been used in both senses—originally transmitted in a performance, it has also been used to describe the more high-brow. The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production, the structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception. The early modern tragedy Hamlet by Shakespeare and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles are among the masterpieces of the art of drama, a modern example is Long Days Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. Closet drama describes a form that is intended to be read, in improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance, performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience. Western drama originates in classical Greece, the theatrical culture of the city-state of Athens produced three genres of drama, tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. Their origins remain obscure, though by the 5th century BCE they were institutionalised in competitions held as part of celebrating the god Dionysus. The competition for tragedies may have begun as early as 534 BCE, tragic dramatists were required to present a tetralogy of plays, which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. Comedy was officially recognized with a prize in the competition from 487 to 486 BCE, five comic dramatists competed at the City Dionysia, each offering a single comedy. Ancient Greek comedy is traditionally divided between old comedy, middle comedy and new comedy, following the expansion of the Roman Republic into several Greek territories between 270–240 BCE, Rome encountered Greek drama. While Greek drama continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, from the beginning of the empire, however, interest in full-length drama declined in favour of a broader variety of theatrical entertainments. The first important works of Roman literature were the tragedies and comedies that Livius Andronicus wrote from 240 BCE, five years later, Gnaeus Naevius also began to write drama. No plays from either writer have survived, by the beginning of the 2nd century BCE, drama was firmly established in Rome and a guild of writers had been formed
5.
Comedy
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In a modern sense, comedy refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, and stand-up comedy. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece, in the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a Society of Youth and a Society of the Old, a revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. Satire and political satire use comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, parody subverts popular genres and forms, critiquing those forms without necessarily condemning them. Similarly scatological humour, sexual humour, and race humour create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comic ways, a comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society and uses humor to parody or satirize the behaviour and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms. The adjective comic, which means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage. Of this, the word came into usage through the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time. The Greeks and Romans confined their use of the comedy to descriptions of stage-plays with happy endings. Aristotle defined comedy as an imitation of men worse than the average, however, the characters portrayed in comedies were not worse than average in every way, only insofar as they are Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others, the mask, for instance, in the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings. It is in this sense that Dante used the term in the title of his poem, as time progressed, the word came more and more to be associated with any sort of performance intended to cause laughter. During the Middle Ages, the comedy became synonymous with satire. They disassociated comedy from Greek dramatic representation and instead identified it with Arabic poetic themes and forms and they viewed comedy as simply the art of reprehension, and made no reference to light and cheerful events, or to the troubling beginnings and happy endings associated with classical Greek comedy. After the Latin translations of the 12th century, the term gained a more general meaning in medieval literature. Starting from 425 BCE, Aristophanes, a playwright and satirical author of the Ancient Greek Theater wrote 40 comedies,11 of which survive. Aristophanes developed his type of comedy from the satyr plays
6.
Epic poetry
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An epic poem, epic, epos, or epopee is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have argued that the Homeric epics and these works form the basis of the epic genre in Western literature. Nearly all Western epic self-consciously presents itself as a continuation of the tradition begun by these poems, classical epic employs dactylic hexameter and recounts a journey, either physical or mental or both. Epics also tend to highlight cultural norms and to define or call into question cultural values, another type of epic poetry is epyllion, which is a brief narrative poem with a romantic or mythological theme. The term, which means little epic, came into use in the nineteenth century, the most famous example of classical epyllion is perhaps Catullus 64. The first epics were products of preliterate societies and oral history poetic traditions, in these traditions, poetry is transmitted to the audience and from performer to performer by purely oral means. Early twentieth-century study of living oral traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry. What they demonstrated was that oral epics tend to be constructed in short episodes, each of equal status, interest and this facilitates memorization, as the poet is recalling each episode in turn and using the completed episodes to recreate the entire epic as he performs it. Parry and Lord also contend that the most likely source for written texts of the epics of Homer was dictation from an oral performance, poets in literate societies have sometimes copied the epic format. The earliest surviving European examples are the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes and Virgils Aeneid, other obvious examples are Nonnus Dionysiaca, Tulsidas Sri Ramacharit Manas. In his work Poetics, Aristotle defines an epic as one of the forms of poetry, contrasted with lyric poetry, an attempt to delineate ten main characteristics of an epic, Begins in medias res. The setting is vast, covering many nations, the world or the universe, Begins with an invocation to a muse. Begins with a statement of the theme, contains long lists, called an epic catalogue. Shows divine intervention on human affairs, features heroes that embody the values of the civilization. Often features the tragic heros descent into the Underworld or hell, the hero generally participates in a cyclical journey or quest, faces adversaries that try to defeat him in his journey and returns home significantly transformed by his journey. The epic hero illustrates traits, performs deeds, and exemplifies certain morals that are valued by the society the epic originates from, many epic heroes are recurring characters in the legends of their native culture. Conventions of epics, Preposition, Opens by stating the theme or cause of the epic and this may take the form of a purpose, of a question, or of a situation. Invocation, Writer invokes a Muse, one of the nine daughters of Zeus, the poet prays to the Muses to provide him with divine inspiration to tell the story of a great hero
7.
Literary nonsense
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Literary nonsense is a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning. Even though the most well-known form of nonsense is nonsense verse. The effect of nonsense is often caused by an excess of meaning and its humor is derived from its nonsensical nature, rather than wit or the joke of a punchline. Literary nonsense, as recognized since the century, comes from a combination of two broad artistic sources. The first and older source is the folk tradition, including games, songs, dramas. The literary figure Mother Goose represents common incarnations of this style of writing, the second, newer source of literary nonsense is in the intellectual absurdities of court poets, scholars, and intellectuals of various kinds. Todays literary nonsense comes from a combination of both sources, Lewis Carroll continued this trend, making literary nonsense a worldwide phenomenon with Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Carrolls poem Jabberwocky, which appears in the book, is often considered quintessential nonsense literature. In literary nonsense, certain elements of language and logic that facilitate meaning are balanced by elements that negate meaning. These formal elements include semantics, syntax, phonetics, context, representation, Nonsense tautology, reduplication, and absurd precision have also been used in the nonsense genre. For a text to be within the genre of literary nonsense, if the text employs only occasional nonsense devices, then it may not be classified as literary nonsense, though there may be a nonsensical effect to certain portions of the work. Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy, for instance, employs the device of imprecision by including a blank page. In Flann OBriens The Third Policeman, on the hand, many of the devices of nonsense are present throughout. Gibberish, light verse, fantasy, and jokes and riddles are sometimes mistaken for literary nonsense, pure gibberish, as in the hey diddle diddle of nursery rhyme, is a device of nonsense, but it does not make a text, overall, literary nonsense. If there is not significant sense to balance out such devices, Nonsense is distinct from fantasy, though there are sometimes resemblances between them. The distinction lies in the coherent and unified nature of fantasy, the nature of magic within an imaginary world is an example of this distinction. Fantasy worlds employ the presence of magic to explain the impossible. In nonsense literature, magic is rare but when it does occur, riddles only appear to be nonsense until the answer is found
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