Portal:Literature
Introduction
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment. It can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.
Literature, as an art form, can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography, diaries, memoirs, letters, and essays. Within its broad definition, literature includes non-fictional books, articles, or other written information on a particular subject. (Full article...)
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Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War".
Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies were sold in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." In recent years, however, negative associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool."
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“ | The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. | ” |
— H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu |
More Did you know
- ... that the 1993 romance novel Just This Once was authored by a computer in collaboration with its programmer?
- ... that, as a publisher and literary critic, Drago Siliqi increased translation of foreign literature into Albanian and encouraged Ismail Kadare to write his first novel, The General of the Dead Army?
- ... that Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes' play Octavia Bragaldi moves the Kentucky Tragedy from 1825 to 15th century Milan?
- ... that novelist Shirley Barker's first book of poetry enraged poet Robert Frost?
- ... that Shackles was the first Indonesian novel to portray a prostitute sympathetically?
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Did you know (auto-generated) -
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- ... that campaign literature in the 1894 Montana capital referendum accused Helena residents of copious Manhattan consumption?
- ... that the Lviv branch of the Ukrderzhnatsmenvydav was the main publisher of Polish literature in the Soviet Union by 1941?
- ... that the 1985 manga series Tomoi contains the first depiction of HIV/AIDS in any literary medium in Japan?
- ... that there is a Gambian literature even though it has been argued that there is "minimal basis" for its existence?
- ... that Peter Demetz, who taught German literature at Yale University from 1956 to 1991, was born in Prague where he was persecuted under the Nazis and escaped the Communist regime in 1949?
- ... that the cultural scholar Hermann Bausinger wrote a book about the history of literature from Swabia from the 18th century to the present, published for his 90th birthday?
Today in literature
- 1828 (N.S.) - Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist born
- 1834 - Joseph Henry Shorthouse, English novelist born
- 1868 - Mary Hunter Austin, American writer born
- 1878 - Adelaide Crapsey, American poet born
- 1898 - Stéphane Mallarmé, French poet died
- 1900 - James Hilton, English novelist born
- 1903 - Phyllis Whitney, American writer born
- 1908 - Cesare Pavese, Italian poet and novelist born
- 1980 - John Howard Griffin, American writer died
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