Literature

[7][8] Developments in print technology have allowed an ever-growing distribution and proliferation of written works, while the digital era had blurred the lines between online electronic literature and other forms of modern media.

It can be seen as returning to older, more inclusive notions, so that cultural studies, for instance, include, in addition to canonical works, popular and minority genres.

In a study published in February 2020, new evidence showed that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago.

"[18] Modern archaeology has been unveiling evidence of the human efforts to preserve and transmit arts and knowledge that depended completely or partially on an oral tradition, across various cultures:

Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality.

[19] In Asia, the transmission of folklore, mythologies as well as scriptures in ancient India, in different Indian religions, was by oral tradition, preserved with precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques.

[27] While some stories were told for amusement and leisure, most functioned as practical lessons from tribal experience applied to immediate moral, social, psychological, and environmental issues.

[30] The enduring significance of oral traditions is underscored in a systemic literature review on indigenous languages in South Africa, within the framework of contemporary linguistic challenges.

Oral literature is crucial for cultural preservation, linguistic diversity, and social justice, as evidenced by the postcolonial struggles and ongoing initiatives to safeguard and promote South African indigenous languages.

[7] From ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education in training orators, lawyers, counselors, historians, statesmen, and poets.

[32][note 1] Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form.

Subsequent innovations included more uniform, predictable legal systems, sacred texts, and the origins of modern practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge-consolidation, all largely reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of writing.

[38] Many works of early periods, even in narrative form, had a covert moral or didactic purpose, such as the Sanskrit Panchatantra (200 BC – 300 AD), based on older oral tradition.

[60] From antiquity until the present day, the influence of Homeric epic on Western civilization has been significant, inspiring many of its most famous works of literature, music, art and film.

Although drama was popular in ancient Greece, of the hundreds of tragedies written and performed during the classical age, only a limited number of plays by three authors still exist: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Western Vernacular literature includes the Poetic Edda and the sagas, or heroic epics, of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the German Song of Hildebrandt.

[71] Controversial, religious, political and instructional literature proliferated during the European Renaissance as a result of the Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press[72] around 1440, while the Medieval romance developed into the novel.

In late 1820s England, growing political and social awareness, "particularly among the utilitarians and Benthamites, promoted the possibility of including courses in English literary study in the newly formed London University".

But while generally women are absent from the European canon of Romantic literature, there is one notable exception, the French novelist and memoirist Amantine Dupin (1804 – 1876) best known by her pen name George Sand.

[99] One study, for example, suggested that the presence of familiar cultural values in literary texts played an important impact on the performance of minority students.

[100] Psychologist Maslow's ideas help literary critics understand how characters in literature reflect their personal culture and the history.

Prominent atheist figures such as the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have praised the King James Version as being "a giant step in the maturing of English literature" and "a great work of literature", respectively, with Dawkins adding: "A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian".

[citation needed] Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its greater use of the aesthetic qualities of language, including musical devices such as assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm, and by being set in lines and verses rather than paragraphs, and more recently its use of other typographical elements.

[116] Prior to the 19th century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines: "any kind of subject consisting of Rhythm or Verses".

[111] Possibly as a result of Aristotle's influence (his Poetics), "poetry" before the 19th century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art.

[124] It was the lingua franca among literate Europeans until quite recent times, and the great works of Descartes (1596 – 1650), Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), and Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) were published in Latin.

Among the last important books written primarily in Latin prose were the works of Swedenborg (d. 1772), Linnaeus (d. 1778), Euler (d. 1783), Gauss (d. 1855), and Isaac Newton (d. 1727).

Common literary examples of non-fiction include, the essay; travel literature; biography, autobiography and memoir; journalism; letter; diary; history, philosophy, economics; scientific, nature, and technical writings.

[154] A notable example of censorship is James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which has been described by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov as a "divine work of art" and the greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose.

Given the diversity of the field, awards are typically limited in scope, usually on: form, genre, language, nationality and output (e.g. for first-time writers or debut novels).