• What is literature?
• Characteristics of the literature
• History of literature
• Importance of literature
• Types of literature
• Literary genres

We explain what literature is, its history, types and other characteristics. Also, what and what are the literary genres.

Literature uses language, imagination and rhetorical figures from subjectivity.

What is literature?

Literature is one of the Fine arts and one of the oldest forms of artistic expression, characterized, according to the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, by "verbal expression." In other words, it achieves its aesthetic ends through the word, both oral and mostly written.

However, it is never easy to justify what is and what is not literature, since this is a historically constructed concept (that is, literature was written before the idea of ​​literature existed). Thus, it was revised and redefined numerous times over time, and there are multiple possible definitions.

One of the unique features of literature is its use of language, which is often called the "literary language", and which differs from ordinary or everyday use. His particular use of language pursues beauty and reflection on himself, not only through the use of tropes and rhetorical figures, but also of a particular sense of rhythm and the sense.

To this, in addition, must be added the permissions that fiction gives: situations, images and stories from the imagination or the reality same, but filtered through subjectivity.

Literature is a field of study in itself: it serves as an object of study for literary theory and literary criticism, as well as for the philology and history of literature. On the other hand, one can also speak of literature in a sense not related to the art, but referred to an organized set of knowledge and texts around a theme: "medical literature" or "technical literature", for example.

Characteristics of the literature

Literature, in general, is characterized by the following:

• It consists of the use of verbal language for aesthetic purposes, that is, moving it away from everyday communicative use, and concentrating rather on its forms.
• He uses rhetorical tools (figures or tropes), rhythm and imagination or fantasy to compose pieces of a different nature.
• The different existing literary manifestations are classified into literary genres. The three ancient genres were the epic, the tragedy and the lyric; while modern genres are the narrative, the dramaturgy, the poetry and the rehearsal.
• What is understood as literature at one time may change in the next, incorporating or losing texts to what is considered canonical. This is the reason why many texts originally written as scientific texts or religious, they are considered today as literature.
• Today it is disseminated and recognized more than ever before in the history, thanks to the emergence of a massive literary-publishing apparatus, and the high literacy margins of the contemporary world.

History of literature

The Egyptian "Book of the Dead" was one of the earliest literary works.

The word literature comes from Latin littera, term for "letter", common in words like litterator, which corresponded to the teacher of the schools, in charge of literacy. However, the notion of literature in ancient times was known as poetry u oratory, since the very beginnings of literature are, paradoxically, prior to the invention of writing.

On the other hand, the first written texts were not exactly literary. It is difficult to pinpoint when and where the first forms of literature in history emerged. However, it is known that the first tradition Formal was the epic, which fulfilled foundational roles and contained not only military feats, but also the cosmological and religious visions of its peoples.

In this sense, important examples are the Epic of Gilgamesh (2500-2000 BC.C.), one of the oldest known texts, composed on clay tablets in ancient Sumeria; or the Book of the Dead Egyptian, used in funeral rites of the New Kingdom (1540 BC) until about 60 BC. C.

However, the Western literary tradition has its formal beginning in the Classic Greece, with the transcription of the epic texts attributed to Homer (c. 8th century BC): the Iliad and the Odyssey, framed in the events of the Trojan War. These texts were probably recited orally, so they were composed in verse. On the other hand, they inspired later creators of the same cultural tradition to compose the great Greek tragedies: the great playwrights Aeschylus (c. 525-c. 456 BC), Sophocles (496-406 BC) and Euripides. (c. 480-406 BC).

Comedians such as Aristophanes (444-385 BC) and the first literary theorist, the famous student of Plato, Aristotle "The Stagirite" (384-322 BC) belong to the same tradition. His Poetics It is the first attempt in history to methodically organize, classify and understand literary creation. The importance of this text is such that even today many of its terms are in common use in literary criticism and theory.

Greek literature was later inherited by the Romans, who perpetuated its aesthetic tradition in more ways than one. The founding epic of the poet Virgilio stands out, Aeneid, in which he linked the founding of the Roman Empire to the Trojan survivors of the war.

However, the Greco-Roman tradition was rejected during the Middle Ages European, in which Christianity imposed its religious imaginary and its values, as well as their own literary forms. Thus, medieval Christian literature focused on divine experience, hagiography (lives of the saints) and mystical poetry, as well as the reading of the Bible and other sacred texts. A good example of this is the Confessions of San Agustín, in which he relates his discovery of God and his conversion to the Church, in addition to reflecting on various religious and philosophical concepts.

Only in the 15th century, at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of Renaissance European, something similar to what we understand today as literature was born. Poetic art echoed the transformations typical of the arrival of the Humanism and it proliferated in very different aspects. In this period, the literature of the Baroque (especially in Spain), whose highest representative is Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) with his Don Quixote de la Mancha, a work that gave birth to the genre of the novel modern. Elizabethan literature was also important with the dramaturgy of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), central in the tradition of the West until today.

Since then, literature has continued a march of constant innovation and renewal, hand in hand with the philosophical currents that prevailed from now on. Thus, there was a literature of the Illustration (in which the Realism), a literature of the Romanticism, and finally a post-romanticism that, in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inaugurated modern literature (which could well be called contemporary).

With the changes what did he bring capitalism In the 20th century and the scientific-technological revolution, the artistic avant-gardes were born, among which literature is the protagonist, in a constant search for new and freer forms of expression.

The novel was the most visible genre of the Contemporary age. Thus, it gave rise to the emergence of mixed or transgeneric forms, characteristic of the beginnings of the globalization from the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

Importance of literature

Literature is one of the great forms of artistic expression of all time, whose work material is one of the most characteristic of the humanity there is: the language.

Throughout its vast and complex history, literature has not only experimented in its expressive forms, but has also echoed profound changes in the culture and the way of thinking of human being, becoming a powerful mirror of the time.

Types of literature

Science fiction was created in literature.

Literature does not have a universal or standard classification, since it is usually classified rather according to its time of production, or to the techniques or means employees, thus forming different literary "schools" that, broadly speaking, we can summarize as:

• Ancient literature. Those that belong to the Old age, of course, and that are mostly composed of religious, epic or similar texts.
• Classic literature. Those that belong to the classical Greco-Roman era, that is, to Ancient Greece and Roman civilization.
• Modern literature. That which is typical of the Contemporary Age, that is, of the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Avant-garde literature. That which responds to the mandate of the vanguards artistic, who was looking for new and revolutionary ways of understanding the artistic fact.
• Mystical literature. One that responds to a religious culture, and that addresses religious themes or relates mystical episodes. Christian literature is part of it.
• Romantic literature. That typical of romanticism, whose values ​​tended to exalt the artist's subjectivity, the world of emotions and irrationality. The term is also popularly used for popular romance or relationship literature.
• Literature of Science fiction. One in which dilemmas typical of industrial society arise, based on the exaggeration or extrapolation of contemporary technical or scientific possibilities.
• Erotic literature. The one that relates suggestive or exciting episodes from an erotic or sexual point of view.
• Realistic literature. The one in which fictions are represented that respond to the same principles of the real world.
• Fantastic literature. The one that moves away from the real world and creates the rules of its own universe, allowing for magical, unreal events, etc.
• Oral literature. That which is prior to writing, or typical of popular traditions other than writing, and which is transmitted orally from generation to generation.

Literary genres

Literary genres are a horizon of reading expectations, that is, a previous classification of the types of literary works that are composed and consumed, which tells us before even opening a book what type of content we will find.

In addition, genres offer writers a set of rules by which to guide themselves when composing their works. However, writers can break those rules, and that dynamic is what introduces the change in the concept of literature.

The modern literary genres are four:

• Poetry. Originally written in rhymed verses (although now free verse predominates), poetry is today the freest genre of all, whose only common feature seems to be that of description subjective of any reality, using for it metaphors, images and word games whose meaning does not necessarily have to be clear or understandable.
• Narrative. The art of telling, of telling a story, survives today from the most remote times of our history as a species. This genre is characterized by the presence of a narrator, whether or not a character also, and comprises three subgenres:
  • Story. A short or medium narrative composition, that can be read in one go and that progresses towards its own end, in a closed universe of events.
  • Novel. The most hybrid and complex narrative genre, which composes medium to long-term pieces in which a story is approached from very different perspectives, being able to incorporate supplementary information, rubble, detours, delays, and offering a longer and slower reading experience than the story.
  • Chronicle. Straddling literature and journalism, This genre tells real events through narrative techniques typical of literary fiction, and it usually includes, although they are not technically the same, subgenres such as the newspaper or correspondence. That is why sometimes it is preferred to speak of "Non-fiction".
• Dramaturgy. The art of composition of theatrical pieces, that is, texts intended (or not) for a stage performance, that is, on stage, with characters performing actions in a continuous present, devoid of a narrator.
• Rehearsal. The art of digression or poetic reflection is a modern genre in which an author lectures on a topic of interest, offering information Y conclusions subjective, with no other purpose than to address the issue and express a point of view.