Almost all senses of the English word literature and its cognates in other Indo-European languages can eventually be traced back to the act of scratching (on a piece of leather or on clay, stone, wood, wax, pottery, lead, or papyrus). But this primitive act very quickly became associated with superior development: civilization.
The Hellenistic Greeks had a robust sense of the different kinds of writing within the idea of grammata. In book 10 of the Republic, Plato distinguished sharply, for example, between philosophy (dialectic), which he championed, and poetry, which he wanted to ban because of its propensity to settle for superficial views of things and to stir the emotions unnecessarily. Aristotle's treatises …
The word for literature in Chinese (wenxue) is an ancient term revived for twentieth-and twenty-first-century needs. In a Chinese schoolroom or bookstore, wenxue designates a familiar activity: the reading of poetry, plays, and novels augmented by criticism and the study of some historical and philosophical works for pleasure and instruction. The properties of wenxue map precisely onto those of Eu…
The semantic range of the Arabic word adab, which in modern usage designates literature in the specialized sense of artistic writing, has shifted considerably over time. As an intellectual standard of cultivation, the notion of adab came into being after the emergence of poetry, the cardinal genre of Arabic literature, called "the register of the Arabs" (Allen, p. 104). The Arabic od…
In 1777 Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was invited to compose critical essays for an edition of English poets, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342–1400), then being prepared by London booksellers. Once the anthology—which was shortened to begin with the early seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley—was complete, Johnson's fifty-two introductions were published s…
In some ways, "world" literature predates the nationalizing of literary traditions, since the classical and medieval period is quite polyglot and multicultural. But world literature and comparative literature were given new life in the late twentieth century by the awareness of the historical power of European imperialism and the rise of postcolonial literatures in India, Africa, Sou…
Allen, Roger. The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of Its Genres and Criticism. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Beeston, A. F. L., et al., eds. Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Bradshaw, Henry. The Life of Saint Werburge of Chester. Edited by Carl Horstmann. Millwood, N.Y.: Krauss Reprint Co., 1975. C…
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