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Definitions of Literature:
The word Literature is derived from latin word litteratura which means "writing formed with letters"
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There are different definitions of literature and all these
definition are defined on the basis of its properties
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This definition means that literature shows us life as it is
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If life is better, the literature will reflect that goodness; if life is hard and
bitter, the literature will show that hardship
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As it is said that “every
writer is the child of his own age” means that writers are shaped by the times they live in
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This idea comes from the belief that
"behind every book is a man; behind every man is the race; and behind every race is a society
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This definition means that all written materials are considered literature
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If look at ancient times literature, the oral tradition were used to followed for the
expression of art and literature(as in case of Homer), so what about the stories and poems from ancient
times that were not written down but were told orally? These are still considered literature even though
they were not written
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This shows that literature includes more than
just written texts
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This definition expands the idea of literature to include both written and spoken words
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Storytelling, poetry recitation, and other
spoken forms are also literature
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iv) "Pieces of writing that are valued as works of art, especially novels, plays, and poems, having
artistic taste
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Not all written works are literature; only those with artistic qualities, like novels, plays, and
poems, are
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v) "Literature is the art of letters
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Abdus Salam( Punjabi Pakistani theoretical physicist
and Noble prize Laureate)
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Abdus Salam, literature is like a form of art using words
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In this context, beauty is something subjective (personal), that
attracts our senses and gives emotional satisfaction
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Literature turns thoughts and emotions into beautiful, artistic writing
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This definition explains that literature is the way in which beauty is expressed through writing
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It
means literature uses beautiful language to convey ideas and emotions
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This definition focuses on the arrangement of words in literature
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It focuses on the
form and style of writing
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This definition suggests that literature finds amazing things in everyday life and describes them in a way
that makes them seem special
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xi) "Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty; It is the written record of man's
spirit, of his thoughts, emotions, and aspirations: it is the history, and the only history, of the human
soul
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Long in his book"English Literature "
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Long,
literature captures and expresses the truth and beauty of life
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Literature serves as a written history of human
experiences and emotions throughout time
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For further explanation check the detail given at last¹
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This small phrase the word
blood means feelings and ink means pen down or to write
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Long):
"Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty; It is the written record of
man's spirit, of his thoughts, emotions, and aspirations: it is the history, and the only history,
of the human soul
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INTRODUCTION--THE MEANING OF LITERATURE
Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede
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Follow your spirit
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A child and a man were one day walking on the seashore when the
child found a little shell and held it to his ear
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The child's face filled with wonder as he listened
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Then came the man, explaining that the child heard nothing strange; that the pearly
curves of the shell simply caught a multitude of sounds too faint for human ears, and filled the
glimmering hollows with the murmur of innumerable echoes
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Some such experience as this awaits us when we begin the study of literature, which has always
two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and appreciation, the other of analysis and exact
description
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To enter and enjoy this new world, to love good books for their own
sake, is the chief thing; to analyze and explain them is a less joyous but still an important
matter
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These also we
must know, if the book is to speak its whole message
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Qualities of Literature: with example
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All
art is the expression of life in forms of truth and beauty; or rather, it is the reflection of some
truth and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought to our
attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves of the shell reflect sounds
and harmonies too faint to be otherwise noticed
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He looks deeper,
sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass, and he reflects what he sees in a little
poem in which the hay tells its own story:

Yesterday's flowers am I,
And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew
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Yesterday's flowers that are yet in me
Must needs make way for all to-morrow's flowers
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And as my soul, so too their soul will be
Laden with fragrance of the days gone by
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Yet will my perfume-laden soul bring back,
As a sweet memory, to women's hearts
Their days of maidenhood
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I bear away with me
The sunshine's dear remembrance, and the low
Soft murmurs of the spring
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[1]
One who reads only that first exquisite line, "Yesterday's flowers am I," can never again see hay
without recalling the beauty that was hidden from his eyes until the poet found it
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Thus
architecture is probably the oldest of the arts; yet we still have many builders but few
architects, that is, men whose work in wood or stone suggests some hidden truth and beauty to
the human senses
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In the broadest sense,
perhaps, literature means simply the written records of the race, including all its history and
sciences, as well as its poems and novels; in the narrower sense literature is the artistic record
of life, and most of our writing is excluded from it, just as the mass of our buildings, mere
shelters from storm and from cold, are excluded from architecture
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2) Suggestive: The second quality of literature is its suggestiveness, its appeal to our emotions
and imagination rather than to our intellect
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When Milton makes Satan say, "Myself am Hell," he does not
state any fact, but rather opens up in these three tremendous words a whole world of
speculation and imagination
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He opens a door
through which our imagination enters a new world, a world of music, love, beauty, heroism,-the whole splendid world of Greek literature
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When Shakespeare
describes the young Biron as speaking

In such apt and gracious words
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
he has unconsciously given not only an excellent description of himself, but the measure of all
literature, which makes us play truant with the present world and run away to live awhile in the
pleasant realm of fancy
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3) Permanent: The third characteristic of literature, arising directly from the other two, is its
permanence
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Notwithstanding its hurry and bustle and
apparent absorption in material things, it does not willingly let any beautiful thing perish
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But this problem of too many books is not modern,
as we suppose
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" Even earlier, a thousand years before
Caxton and his printing press, the busy scholars of the great library of Alexandria found that the
number of parchments was much too great for them to handle; and now, when we print more
in a week than all the Alexandrian scholars could copy in a century, it would seem impossible
that any production could be permanent; that any song or story could live to give delight in
future ages
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When we examine the writings that

by common consent constitute our literature, the clear stream purified of its dross, we find at
least two more qualities, which we call the tests of literature, and which determine its
permanence
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Though we speak of national and race literatures,
like the Greek or Teutonic, and though each has certain superficial marks arising out of the
peculiarities of its own people, it is nevertheless true that good literature knows no nationality,
nor any bounds save those of humanity
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Every father must respond to the parable of the prodigal son;
wherever men are heroic, they will acknowledge the mastery of Homer; wherever a man thinks
on the strange phenomenon of evil in the world, he will find his own thoughts in the Book of
Job; in whatever place men love their children, their hearts must be stirred by the tragic sorrow
of _Oedipus_ and _King Lear_
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The second test is a purely personal one, and may be expressed in the indefinite word "style
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In a deeper sense, style is the man, that is, the unconscious expression of the writer's own
personality
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As no glass is colorless, but tinges more or less deeply the reflections from its
surface, so no author can interpret human life without unconsciously giving to it the native hue
of his own soul
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Every permanent
book has more or less of these two elements, the objective and the subjective, the universal
and the personal, the deep thought and feeling of the race reflected and colored by the writer's
own life and experience
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Now man is ever a dual creature; he has an outward and an inner
nature; he is not only a doer of deeds, but a dreamer of dreams; and to know him, the man of
any age, we must search deeper than his history
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When we read a history of the Anglo-Saxons, for
instance, we learn that they were sea rovers, pirates, explorers, great eaters and drinkers; and
we know something of their hovels and habits, and the lands which they harried and plundered
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Then we turn from history to the literature which they themselves produced, and instantly we
become acquainted
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At the words of their gleemen we thrill again to their wild love of freedom and the open sea; we
grow tender at their love of home, and patriotic at their deathless loyalty to their chief, whom
they chose for themselves and hoisted on their shields in symbol of his leadership
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All these and many more intensely real emotions pass through our souls as we read
the few shining fragments of verses that the jealous ages have left us
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To understand them we must read not simply their history,
which records their deeds, but their literature, which records the dreams that made their deeds
possible
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Importance of Literature
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Nothing could be farther from the truth
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The Greeks were a marvelous people; yet of all their mighty
works we cherish only a few ideals,--ideals of beauty in perishable stone, and ideals of truth in
imperishable prose and poetry
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Our democracy, the boast of all English-speaking
nations, is a dream; not the doubtful and sometimes disheartening spectacle presented in our
legislative halls, but the lovely and immortal ideal of a free and equal manhood, preserved as a
most precious heritage in every great literature from the Greeks to the Anglo-Saxons
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In a word, our whole civilization, our freedom, our progress, our homes, our religion, rest solidly
upon ideals for their foundation
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It is therefore
impossible to overestimate the practical importance of literature, which preserves these ideals
from fathers to sons, while men, cities, governments, civilizations, vanish from the face of the
earth
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Summary of the Subject: We are now ready, if not to define, at least to understand a little
more clearly the object of our present study
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It is characterized by its artistic, its
suggestive, its permanent qualities
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Its object, aside from the delight it gives us, is to know man, that is, the soul of man rather than
his actions; and since it preserves to the race the ideals upon which all our civilization is
founded, it is one of the most important and delightful subjects that can occupy the human
mind

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