LITERATURE

LITERATURE
1. Artistic creation through LANGUAGE and its products: French literature, literature in English.

2. The texts of a group or subject: scientific and technical literature, the latest literature on computers.

‘Literary’ literature

It is impossible to define the primary sense of literature precisely or to set rigid limits on its use. Literary treatment of a subject requires creative use of the imagination: something is constructed which is related to ‘real’ experience, but is not of the same order. What has been created in language is known only through language, and the text does not give access to a reality other than itself. As a consequence, the texts that make up English literature are a part and a product of the English language and cannot be separated from it, even though there may be distinct university departments of English as ‘language’ and as ‘literature’.

Identifying a literary text

Traditionally, literary texts have been easy to identify: an ode or a play is ‘literary’, but a menu or a telephone directory is not. There is, however, an indeterminate area of essays, biographies, memoirs, history, philosophy, travel books, and other texts which may or may not be deemed literary. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) is commonly studied as a political text and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678–84) as a literary text, yet they share certain qualities, such as lively personifications; Bunyan creates Giant Despair and Little-faith, while Hobbes writes ‘the Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the Deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof’. As Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) has grown less important as history, it has become more significant as literature. Many texts appear therefore to have literary aspects combined with other qualities and purposes, and ultimately individual or consensual choice must decide which has priority. Private and group judgement is also exercised in evaluative criticism. The word literature tends to be used with approval of works perceived as having artistic merit, the evaluation of which may depend on social and linguistic as well as aesthetic factors. If the criteria of quality become exacting, a canon may emerge, limited in its inclusions and exclusions, and the members of a society or group may be required (with varying degrees of pressure and success) to accept that canon and no other. Academic syllabuses for degrees in English have traditionally covered periods, focused on such well-established writers as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. Courses introduced more recently may include such topics as Women's Writing, with study of recent novelists like Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood as well as Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, or Black American Literature, with James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

Literature and language

In the formative period of a written language, a successful literature may favour a particular dialect and contribute towards its becoming a national printed standard, in the case of English the East Midlands dialect from the 14c onwards. The prestige of literature can attract favour to an associated ‘high style’ that rejects aspects of common usage as vulgar. This favour prevailed for a time in some Continental European literatures, such as the dolce stil of 12c Italy and 17–18c classical French writing, but apart from the 18c cult of poetic diction has had little influence in the English-speaking world. Literature is an exceptional area of language use, which many people have regarded as the highest service to which language can be put and the surest touchstone of good usage. Its creation is dependent on the resources available to the author in any period, but those resources may be enriched and increased by a literary tradition in which quotations from and allusions to ‘the classics’ abound and many words have literary nuances. Writers have created such enduring neologisms as Spenser's blatant, Milton's pandemonium, and Shaw's superman.

The language of literature

In the 20c, much attention has been given to the language of literature and the question of whether there is in fact distinctively literary language. Many features thought of as literary appear in common usage. Metre and formal rhythm derive from everyday speech, words often rhyme without conscious contrivance, multiple meaning and word associations are part of daily communication, and tropes and figures of speech are used in ordinary discourse. However, literary language shows a greater concentration of such features, deliberately arranged and controlled. It may be said that communication is impossible without artifice, yet there is a difference between the colloquial simile that someone is ‘as bold as brass’ and T. S. Eliot's simile for the young man in The Waste Land (1922): ‘One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’ The difference lies not only in the originality and unexpected juxtaposition, but in the appropriateness of image to context, in the austere tone of the whole poem, in the evocation of a snobbish post-1918 attitude to men who had become rich through government contracts during the war.

Language in literature

Literary language may be drawn from any area or register of daily usage. Colloquialism and dialect are used in fictional and dramatic dialogue, as in this passage from Sons and Lovers ( D. H. Lawrence, 1913):‘But how late you are!’
‘Aren't I!’ he cried, turning to his father.
‘Well, dad!’
The two men shook hands.
‘Well, my lad!’
Morel's eyes were wet.
‘We thought tha'd niver be commin',’ he said.
‘Oh, I'd come!’ exclaimed William.
In James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom reads an advertisement in a newspaper:What is home without
Plumtree's Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.
and incorporates the jingle into his stream of consciousness. The pattern of metre and rhyme may transform into poetry a statement which has neither rare words nor unusual syntax:The lad came to the door at night,
When lovers crown their vows,
And whistled soft and out of sight
In shadow of the boughs.
( A. E. Housman, ‘The True Lover’, 1896)
Prevailing literary fashion may make literary language seem artificial without impairing comprehension:If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like thy own solemn springs,
Thy springs and dying gales.
( William Collins, 1721–59, ‘Ode to Evening’)
Experiment and the personal vision may challenge the reader to make a new response to language and to accept T. S. Eliot's dictum that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’:Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes.
( Dylan Thomas, 1914–53, ‘Fern Hill’)
These extracts are from texts commonly accepted as part of literature, yet, out of context, they seem to present irreconcilable differences. Every literary work must be seen in its totality as a unique creation, often connected by similarities with other texts but dependent on none for its validity.