literature 
lit·era·ture (lit′ər ə c̸hər, li′trə-)
noun
- the profession of an author; production of writings, esp. of imaginative prose, verse, etc.
- all writings in prose or verse, esp. those of an imaginative or critical character, without regard to their excellence: often distinguished from scientific writing, news reporting, etc.
- all of such writings considered as having permanent value, excellence of form, great emotional effect, etc.
- all the writings of a particular time, country, region, etc., specif. those regarded as having lasting value because of their beauty, imagination, etc. American literature
- all the writings dealing with a particular subject the medical literature
- all the compositions for a specific musical instrument, voice, or ensemble
- printed matter of any kind, as advertising, campaign leaflets, etc.
- Archaic acquaintance with books; literary knowledge
Etymology: ME litterature < OFr < L litteratura < littera, letter
literature
n.
Artistic production in language
letters, lore, belles-lettres, literary works, literary productions, writing, the humanities, classics, books, polite literature, polite letters, republic of letters, writings; see also biography, drama 1, exposition 2, history 2, novel, poetry, record 1, 2, story, writing 2.Great bodies of literature include: Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Icelandic, Hebraic, Arabic, Coptic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Hindu, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Provençal, Slavic.
Periods in western literature include: classical, heroic, medieval, neoclassical, renaissance, Georgian, pseudoclassical, Augustan, Romantic, Victorian, contemporary, modern, recent, twentieth-century, postmodern.
Written matter treating a given subject
discourse, composition, treatise, dissertation, thesis, tract, paper, theme, treatment, disquisition, essay, discussion, research, observation, comment, findings, abstract, précis, report, critique, summary; see also article 3, exposition 2.
Converse of object
- publish: There is limited published literature on late 18th century English glass.
- burgeon: They further argue that despite the burgeoning literature on the merger of ICT and education, discourse between the three paradigms is surprisingly limited.
- appraise: Demonstrate the ability to appraise selected literature using an appraisal checklist.
- translate: Other work includes: A n article about translating Basque literature, published in Transcript, the European Internet Review of Books and Writing.
- exist: There already exists some literature explaining the importance of including the views of patients when planning and delivering mental health services.
- review: The student will develop an ability to critically review the literature.
Adjective modifier
- promotional: The company requires that the name of ' The Air Gallery ' be used in all promotional literature used by the hirer.
- English: Congratulations on getting a BA honors degree in English literature.
- scientific: Extract from RSPH website: 'A draft report of the scientific literature on the impacts of water on health ' .
- gray: Much of the information is derived from unpublished or gray literature.
- classical: The two papers on Classical Studies will contain questions on Ancient History and Classical Literature.
- medieval: In late medieval Bengali literature Kali has a central place.
Modifies a noun
- review: Also, during these meetings, the advisor suggested readings for literature review.
- search: He ' logs on ' to his library website to conduct an online literature search.
Noun used with modifier
- wisdom: There is a degree of resonance with some of the wisdom literature in Proverbs.
- Sanskrit: Sanskrit literature, both sacred and secular, is immensely rich and varied.
- journal: The PubMed tutorial is designed to assist users in employing the National Library of Medicine's journal literature search system in their research.
- marketing: The very concept of loyalty seems to have become a dynamic one with the marketing literature presenting different aspects of the concept.
- economics: Such findings are at odds with standard theory yet accord with a substantial number of findings within the marketing and experimental economics literatures.
- recruitment: Check individual firms ' websites and recruitment literature for precise details.
All modernAmericanliterature comesfromonebook by MarkTwain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing good since.
Il faut n'appeler Science que l'ensemble des recettes qui re¤ ussissent toujours.öTout le reste est litte¤ rature. Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.
C'est avec de beaux sentiments qu'on fait de la mauvaise litte¤ rature. Bad literature is written with beautiful sentiments.
Le plagiat est la base de toutes les litte¤ ratures, excepte¤ de la premie' re, qui d'ailleurs est inconnue. Plagiarism is the base of all literature except the first text which, however, is unknown.
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick: camp- following eunuchs of literature.
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machineryand primitive music and primitive medicine.
The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.
They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.
English literature's performing flea.
Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism, or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
EDUCATION.öAt Mr Wackford Squeers's Academy, Dotheboys Hall, at the delightful village of Dotheboys, near Greta Bridge inYorkshire.Youth are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, providedwith all necessaries, instructed inall languages, living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry, the use of the globes, algebra, single stick (if required), writing, arithmetic, fortification, and every other branch of classical literature. Terms, twenty guineas per annum. No extras, no vacations, and diet unparalleled.
Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure EŁ parse au vent crispe¤ du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym. Et tout le reste est litte¤ rature. May your verse be a glorious adventure Strewn by the crisp morning air Which helps the mint and the thyme grow. Everything else is mere literature.
The pimple on the face of American literature.
The function of literature through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and thehigh authorityof theself in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead.How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception.Youaretheghoul of literature.Lovely.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
She was thinkingöfor, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other wayöthat all this had been described in Dickens,Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silentöfor here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.
Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
I never mentioned a man but with the view Of selling my own works. The tip's a good one, as for literature It gives no man a sinecure.
Literature has a lot to answer for, where concepts of the countryside are concerned.
We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.
Literature ismostlyabout having sex and not muchabout having children. Life is the other way round.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Literature is a power line and the motor, mark you, is the reader.
Literature is based not on life but on propositions about life, of which this is one.
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
Literatureis lonely and waited for, brilliant and pure and frightened, a marriage of birds, a conversation of the blind.
We have to acknowledge that the thing we call 'literature' ismorepluralisticnow, just associetyoughtto be. The melting pot never worked.
Literature is news that news.
Literature is not an abstract science, to which exact definitions can be applied.It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Literature istheart of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world.That'swhy it almost alwayshastobe onthesideof the underdog.
Is it not singular how some men continue to obtain the reputation of popular authorship without adding a word to the literature of their country worthy of note? To puff and to get one's self puffed have become different branches of a new profession.
Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! The true antithesisto knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.
No se le hab|¤a ocurrido pensar hasta entonces que la literatura fuera el mejor juguete que se hab|¤a inventado para burlarse de la gente. It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
I don't know anything that mars good literature so completelyas too much truth.
You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.
Los metaf|¤sicos de Tl o« n no buscan la verdad ni siquiera la verosimilitud: buscan el asombro. Juzgan que la metaf|¤sica es una rama de la literatura fanta¤ stica. The metaphysicians of Tlo« n do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.
Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
If photography is allowed to stand in forart in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thankstothenatural support it will find inthestupidityof themultitude.It must return toits real task, which isto be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.
No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers in contempt.Theydoit becausetheyget no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question.
Name me one character in literature or drama who can't be described as neurotic We wouldn't want to know the people we get to see on the stage. How would you like to have Medea for dinner? Or Macbeth slurping your soup? Or Oedipus with his bloody, blinded eyes dripping all over your tablecloth?
We know too much and are convinced of too little.Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
The people which ceases to care for its literary inheritance becomes barbaric; the people which ceases to produce literature ceases to move in thought and sensibility.
Ina real sense, peoplewhohavereadgood literaturehave lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
So we have the Philistine of genius in religionöLuther; the Philistine of genius in politicsöCromwell; the Philistine of genius in literatureöBunyan.
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories inall literature.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedöand then is often redecidedöso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.
Hehadaddedtohisstoriesa littlestoryofmeditationsand inthesehesaidthat The Enormous Roomwasthegreatest book he had ever read. It was then that Gertrude Stein said,Hemingway, remarks are not literature.
Hebelievesthat sciencefictionistheapocalyptic literature of the 20th century, the authentic language of Auschwitz, Eniwetok and Aldermaston.He also believes that inner space, not outer, isthe real subject of science fiction.
Show me an enemy of literature, and I will show him my accounts.
Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop it being brought in from outside.
A louse in the locks of literature.
Beware of anything that promises freedom or enlightenmentötraps for eager and clever foolsöa dog has a keener noseöevery creature in a cave can justify himself. Three-fourths of philosophyand literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.
Your true lover of literature is never fastidious.
I have always wanted to develop a way of writing that was irrevocably black. I don't have the resources of a musician but I thought that if it was truly black literature, it would not be black because Iwas, it would notevenbe black because of its subject matter. It would be something intrinsic, indigenous, something in the way it was put togetheröthe sentences, the structure, texture and toneöso that anyone who read it would realize.
If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.
The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
Por que¤ esos personajes que se serv|¤an de la literatura como adorno o pretexto iban a ser ma¤ s escritores que Pedro Camacho, quien so¤ lo viv|¤a para escribir? Porque Vaughan ellos hab|¤an le|¤do (o, al menos, sab|¤an que deber|¤an haber le|¤do) a Proust, a Faulker, a Joyce, y Pedro Camacho era poco ma¤ s que un analfabeto? Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew thattheyshould haveread) Proust,Faulkner,Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate?
If evil does not exist, what isgoing to happen to literature?
Browse dictionary entries near literature
- ‹ literatim
- ‹ literati
- ‹ literately
- ‹ literate
- ‹ literary remains
- ‹ literary epic
- ‹ literary
- ‹ literariness
- ‹ literalness
- ‹ literally
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