This article will discuss what literature is, what are its main features, types and genres.
Everyone knows what literature is.In a broad sense, this is the totality of all the texts ever written by man. But most often the literature refers to the kind of art whose main task is the writing of works of art. However, this is too narrow an understanding of the term. Literature is publicistic, scientific, philosophical, religious. Educated contemporaries of Homer, for example, with equal pleasure read out the "Aeneid" of Virgil and treatise "On the nature of things" by Lucretius. And critics in the 1820s recognized the best examples of Russian prose "The Experience of Tax Theory" by N. Turgenev and "The History of the Russian State" by N. Karamzin. Both of these works in the modern sense of the art texts do not apply, but this does not prevent them from remaining masterpieces.
The concept of "Literature" has several properties that for many years remain unchanged.
Only author texts are considered literature.They can be either anonymous (created by an unknown author) or collective (written by a certain group of individuals). This point is important because the presence of the author provides the text completeness. The person puts a point and thereby determines the boundaries of the created work, which will henceforth live on its own. The situation is different, for example, with folklore texts. Anyone can add something to him from himself, make changes, compose details. And no one in the world can put a signature on this work. What is literature? This text belongs to a specific author.
The literature includes only written texts.Oral creativity has nothing to do with this type of art. Folklore has always been passed on from mouth to mouth, it can be fixed on paper, but it will be just the author's version of non-literary text. In the modern world there are exceptions to this rule, the so-called transitional cases. They exist in the national cultures of those peoples who, with the advent of writing, still have narrators, whose work, created orally, is immediately subjected to written fixation. Such texts are considered literary. Thus, we come to a broader understanding of what literature is. This is a written text created by a specific author.
Literary texts are texts that are created withusing the words of the human language. These do not include syncretic and synthetic texts, in which the verbal component cannot be disconnected from the visual, musical or any other. An opera or a song is not part of the literature. However, in our time it often happens that music and words in a work are created by the same author. It is difficult to say how legitimate it is to consider literature, for example, Vysotsky's poems to his own songs. On the other hand, the fairy tale “The Little Prince” Saint-Exupéry is also not easy to call a literary work solely due to the fact that the author’s illustrations to the text play an important role in it.
In order to finally come to an understandingof what literature is, we must consider another criterion. It refers not to the structure of the text, but to its function. Literary works are records that have social significance, that is, school essays, personal diaries, official correspondence are not related to literature. This rule has exceptions. If letters or diaries are written by a significant author (writer, scholar, politician, etc.) and shed light on his creative work, then over time they receive the status of a literary work. For example, the diary of Sergei Yesenin has long become public knowledge and is published on a par with other works of the poet.
Literature is fiction, documentary,memoir, scientific or popular science, as well as educational, technical and reference. Fiction, in contrast to its other types, has a pronounced aesthetic orientation. Through artistic fiction, the author seeks to convey his conclusions to the reader, and sometimes just to entertain him.
Even in antiquity, the ancient Greek philosopherAristotle in his "Poetics" divided all the works into three kinds: drama, lyrics and epic. In the later European literature passed many genres: the novel, elegy, satire, ode, poem, tragedy, comedy. Drama appeared only in the XVIII century. The genre development of literature never stops. In the modern world, we read detectives, science fiction, thrillers, action films, "horrors" and other interesting books. Nowadays, literature is distributed not only on paper, but also by means of computer files on electronic media.
Literature was important tothe social and political life of Russia. In a state where an enlightened society could not freely express its ideas and thoughts, this art form became a kind of outlet. For example, in the 19th century, the Russian language and literature were of a forced journalistic nature. The most widely read authors were documentalists and journalists. Critic V. G. Belinsky, who did not compose a single novel, story or play in his life, became a famous and very readable writer.
As soon as the absolute power of the leader or monarch inRussia was somehow limited, the country was announcing a "great end of literature" (V.V. Rozanov). That was the case in 1910, when a parliamentary monarchy first appeared in Russia, something like this country experienced in the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR.
Russian classical literature is one of the most interesting and readable in the world. L. Tolstoy, N. Gogol, A. Pushkin, F. Dostoevsky - recognized masters of artistic expression.
