Portal:Literature

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The Literary Portal

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Literature is literally "an acquaintance with letters", as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latin littera meaning "an individual written character"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts or works of art, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and the folktale. The word "literature" as a common noun can refer to any form of writing, such as essays; "Literature" as a proper noun refers to a whole body of literary work.

The history of literature begins with the history of writing, in the Bronze Age of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, although the oldest literary texts date to a full millennium after the invention of writing, to the late 3rd millennium BC. The earliest literary authors known by name are Ptahhotep and Enheduanna, dating to ca. the 24th and 23rd centuries BC, respectively. More about Literature...

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"The Raven" is a narrative poem by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in January 1845. It is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow descent into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. The raven, sitting on a bust of Pallas, seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore". The poem makes use of a number of folk and classical references.

Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically. His intention was to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explains in his 1846 follow-up essay "The Philosophy of Composition". The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty by Charles Dickens. Poe borrows the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship". The poem makes use of internal rhyme as well as alliteration throughout.

The first printing of "The Raven" was in the January 29, 1845, issue of the New York Evening Mirror. Its publication made Poe widely popular in his lifetime though it did not bring him much financial success. The poem was soon reprinted, parodied, and illustrated. Although critical opinion is divided as to its status, it remains one of the most famous poems ever written.

Selected picture

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Crowds among the books on display at the 41st Cairo International Book Fair, February 2009.

Image: Mohd Tarmizi

Did you know ...

... that Henry Denker's play about Sigmund Freud (pictured), A Far Country, premiered on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre in 1961, and that Curd Jürgens played Freud in a 1979 German language production at the Theater in der Josefstadt, Vienna?

... that Lawrence Ferlinghetti's best-known collection of poetry is entitled A Coney Island of the Mind?

... that Cordelia Grey, Kate Brannigan, Bertha Cool, V. I. Warshawski, Tally McGinnis (created by Nancy Sanra), and Precious Ramotswe are female private investigators?

... that Nils Holgersson is a boy who takes great delight in hurting the animals on his father's farm?

... that U.S. literary critic Leslie Fiedler was one of the first to question the notion of a gap between "high art" and popular art", in his 1972 book, Cross the Border—Close the Gap?

... that during her lifetime two plays were written about Mary Frith, an English pickpocket?

... that The Doors took their name from the title of a book by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, a phrase which was in turn borrowed from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?

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When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is that always in the book?
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Original: "Wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammenstoßen und es klingt hohl, ist das allemal im Buche?"

A day in literature

22 November

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