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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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the 1969 autobiography about the early years of African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 17. In the course of Caged Bird, Maya transforms from a victim of racism with an inferiority complex into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of responding to prejudice.
Angelou uses her autobiography to explore subjects such as identity, rape, racism, and literacy. She also writes in new ways about women's lives in a male-dominated society. Maya, the younger version of Angelou and the book's central character, has been called "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America". Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the book, although it is presented briefly in the text. Rape is used as a metaphor for the suffering of her race. Another metaphor, that of a bird struggling to escape its cage, is a central image throughout the work.
Selected excerpt
“ | 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 Wounds of Armenia, the first Armenian novel, was published 10 years after the disappearance of its author Khachatur Abovian?
- ... that James Nelson Barker's play The Indian Princess is largely responsible for the modern version of the Pocahontas story?
- ... that actor Andrew Robinson wrote the novel A Stitch in Time, which is about his character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?
- ... that Picasso's poetry has lines like "my grandmother's big balls are shining midst the thistles" and that one of his works depicts Franco as a jackbooted phallus?
- ... that the novel Passing by Nella Larsen, with its focus on "jealousy, psychological ambiguity and intrigue" has been described as a "skillfully executed and enduring work of art"?
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Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that Susan Chitty's memoir on her mother, Antonia White, was viewed as a "literary assassination" when published?
- ... that a teacher of medieval literature and comic books writes the blog Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle?
- ... that despite specializing in literature and serving as a senior editor of the Zhonghua Book Company, historian Zhang Zhenglang never published a single book of his own?
- ... that literary fiction novel Agatha of Little Neon's title stems from a house that is "the color of Mountain Dew"?
- ... 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 North-Western Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) ran an underground network to distribute literature to German soldiers in occupied areas?
Today in literature
- 1321 - Dante Alighieri, Italian poet died
- 1592 - Michel de Montaigne, French writer died
- 1802 - Arnold Ruge, German philosopher and political writer born
- 1808 - Saverio Bettinelli, Italian writer died
- 1830 - Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Austrian writer born
- 1876 - Sherwood Anderson, American writer born
- 1894 - J. B. Priestley, English playwright and novelist born
- 1894 - Julian Tuwim, Polish poet born
- 1916 - Roald Dahl, Welsh writer born
- 1928 - Italo Svevo, Italian author died
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