Meaning of literature | Babel Free

Definitions

1. The body of all written works.
   uncountable, usually
2. The collected creative writing of a nation, people, group, or culture.
   uncountable, usually
3. the style and theories of the Greek writers of Alexandria, 325-30 B.C., whose style was highly ornamented and obscure and favored such forms as the elegy, epigram, epyllion, and lyric and also ventured into the drama. — Alexandrianist, n., adj.
4. All the papers, treatises, etc. published in academic journals on a particular subject.
   uncountable, usually
5. an art form, as a story, painting, or sculpture, in which the components have a symbolic, figurative meaning. — allegorist, allegorizer, n. — allegorical, adj.
   n
6. Written fiction of a high standard.
   uncountable, usually
7. the placing of a scene, character, event, etc., where it clearly does not belong, either for special effect or as an oversight. See also anachronism. — anachoristic, adj.
   adj
8. Literacy; ability to read and write.
   obsolete, uncountable, usually
9. an error in chronology, as the placing of an event or figure in a period or scene in which it did not or could not belong. — anachronistic, adj.
   adj
10. a collection of stories, poems, or other literary material. See also christianity. — anthologist, n.
    n
11. the satirical or humorous use of a word or phrase to convey an idea exactly opposite to its real significance, as Shakespeare’s “honorable men” for Caesar’s murderers. — antiphrastic, adj.
    adj
12. the act or process of plagiarizing one’s own work.
13. the view that literature is a fine art, especially as having a purely aesthetic function. — belletrist, n. — belles lettres, n. — belletristic, adj.
    n
14. an allegorical or moralizing commentary, usually medieval and sometimes illustrated, based upon real or fabled animals.
15. the condition of having a book on the bestseller list.

Equivalents

Examples

“He’s studying English literature at university.”

“There’s a vast body of scientific literature on the subject.”

“classical literature”

“scientific literature”

“world literature”

“The obvious question to ask at this point is: ‘Why posit the existence of a set of Thematic Relations (THEME, AGENT, INSTRUMENT, etc.) distinct from constituent structure relations?ʼ The answer given in the relevant literature is that a variety of linguistic phenomena can be accounted for in a more principled way in terms of Thematic Functions than in terms of constituent structure relations.”

“In fact, information on when each of the terms first appeared in English, and if obsolete, how long they persisted, is entirely absent from the literature.”

“2008, Adam Cadre However, even “literary” science fiction rarely qualifies as literature, because it treats characters as sets of traits rather than as fully realized human beings with unique life stories.”

“They all assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject.”

CEFR level