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.
The term is sometimes used synonymously with literary fiction, which encompasses fiction written with the goal of literary merit.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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"Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just twice. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway's sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon.
The story is one of Hemingway's earliest pieces to employ his Iceberg Theory of writing; a modernist approach to prose in which the underlying meaning is hinted at, rather than explicitly stated. "Big Two-Hearted River" is almost exclusively descriptive and intentionally devoid of plot. Hemingway was influenced by the visual innovations of Cézanne's paintings and adapted the painter's idea of presenting background minutiae in lower focus than the main image. In this story, the small details of a fishing trip are explored in great depth, while the landscape setting, and most obviously the swamp, are given cursory attention.
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More Did you know
- ... that author Elizabeth Jordan edited the first two novels of Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis?
- ... that the first Indonesian novel by a woman, Kalau Tak Untung, deals with an "inexorable fate" which all humans must face?
- ... that Maya Angelou, who recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Clinton's 1993 inauguration, was the first poet to read an inaugural poem since Robert Frost at Kennedy's in 1961?
- ... that the author of Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada worked 15 years as a wildland firefighter on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon?
- ... that Gambler's Lament, one of the few non–religious poems in the ancient Hindu scripture Rig Veda, testifies to the popularity of gambling among Vedic Aryans?
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Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that in her 2021 book The Origins of Early Christian Literature, Robyn Faith Walsh found that German Romanticists were in part responsible for modern scholarly assumptions about the gospels?
- ... 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?
- ... that literary fiction novel Agatha of Little Neon's title stems from a house that is "the color of Mountain Dew"?
- ... that Cathie Dunsford was unable to find many books about lesbianism in the 1970s, but by the 1980s had herself become a writer and anthologist of lesbian literature?
- ... 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 Lviv branch of the Ukrderzhnatsmenvydav was the main publisher of Polish literature in the Soviet Union by 1941?
Today in literature
- 1781 - Johann Nikolaus Götz, German poet died
- 1899 - Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams is published.
- 1918 - Wilfred Owen, English poet died
- 1936 - C. K. (Charles Kenneth) Williams, American poet born
- 1948 - T. S. Eliot wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
- 1960 - Marc Awodey, American artist and writer born
- 2005 - Nadia Anjuman, Afghan poet died
- 2008 - Michael Crichton, American author died
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