What a literary work is can encompass poems, novels, dramas, short stories, sagas, legends, and satires, but in one definition is taken to exclude fact-oriented writing.
[6] In length a literary work can range from short poems to trilogy novels, and in tone from comic verse to tragedy.
Many, from Jean Paul Sartre through Hazard Adams to Laurence Lerner, have written extensively on the subject, it being the focus of entire essays and chapters.
[9][10] And there is broad basic agreement amongst modern art philosophers and critics that "literature" does not encompass older meanings of the word, that are considered obsolete.
"[16] John Martin Ellis observed in the 1970s that it had "become quite common for critics and theorists alike to raise the question, only to go on and assert that we all know what we mean by literature even if we cannot define it".
[25] Stefán Snævarr explains that this view is, in its most reductionst form, irrespective of whether the text is fiction or factual: the semantics of the sentences are irrelevant.
[26] "Anna Karenina" he says, "would not cease to be a literary fictional narrative even though by chance every single sentence in the novel happened to be true".
[28] A literary work is not just some abstraction, a sequence of words, but an utterance made by an author whose historical and other circumstances are vital to its understanding.
[25] The Lamarquian view hinges on two texts being identical "if they have the same semantic and syntactic properties, are in the same language, and consist of the same word-types and sentence-types ordered in the same way".
[25] This is a point that Lamarque also supports, but argues that the differentiation comes from appreciation of authorial and historical context, which is external to the notion of a text.