Via Old French, from the Latin litteratura, ‘learning’, ‘writing’—itself derived from litteratus, ‘knowledgeable’, ‘lettered’, ‘literate’—‘literature’ has, until the second half of the twentieth century, signified a body of creative writing, in verse or prose, intended to be differentiated from other, more workaday forms. More recently, however, ‘literature’ has also included critical or theoretical writing (not only about literary works but also about other, broader topics, such as the nature of art itself), essays and even works of philosophical or historical interest. It has even been expanded to include any writing of a certain length and substance. Thus, for instance, one can read the medical ‘literature’ on a particular ailment, or one can collect from one’s travel agent the ‘literature’ on one’s holiday destination.
The uses or functions of literature
A written literary tradition emerges historically as a consequence of the rise of literacy. If, following a number of historians, we take the modern period to have begun in or around the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, then in pre-modernity literacy was generally limited to members of the upper classes, who could afford to acquire and had the leisure to read books, in whatever form (scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, etc.). Even so, not all members of the upper classes were literate.
In traditional societies with an oral rather than a written literary tradition, the bard—the poet or troubadour who recited in verse and sometimes in song literary renditions of the culture’s history, legends or mythology— made it possible for a broad range of people to hear, at least, if not to read for themselves the literature of their people, even if this was limited chiefly to the deeds of the noble classes. One of the earliest representations of this kind of oral literary tradition is to be found in the Greek poet Homer’s two epic verse narratives, Iliad and Odyssey, thought to have been composed around the eighth century BC. Homer, himself believed to have been a bard, describes bardic recitations to audiences that, in addition to landowners, often included servants or slaves.
Literature and the literary text have historically invoked and provoked a range of responses in their relevant cultural contexts. One of the earliest debates on the value and function of literature, at least in the West, turned ostensibly on moral and ethical issues. In his Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato in the fifth century BC argued for the exclusion of poets (by which he meant writers of all sorts) from his ideal republic because the work they produced affected the audience/ reader by heightening the emotions and addling reason, something anathema to Plato’s notion that the world could be known through natural reason and through a process of simple investigations leading to a complex conclusion. Many readers of Plato’s work, however, have questioned the purity of the moral issue he invokes, because he does permit into his republic those poets who are adept at working the citizens up into the proper state of mind for heroic deeds, nationalist pride and so on—in other words, propagandists.
Aristotle, Plato’s contemporary, implicitly challenged this moral question in his Poetics by arguing that literature—specifically, tragic drama—actually had a morally and emotionally purging effect (which he called catharsis) on the audience, leaving it cleansed, morally uplifted and devoid of ‘negative’ emotions. Plato and Aristotle thus established a key theme for future critics and defenders of literature, for the debate has continued over the centuries since the fifth century BC about whether literature’s capacity to create imaginary worlds, characters and actions, and to sway the reader’s emotions, is a positive or negative quality. (There are many anthologies of critical writing on literature and art that present a broad historical sweep from Plato to the present; see, for instance, Gilbert 1962; Allen and Clark 1962; Smith and Parks 1951.)
Indeed, as literary forms have emerged or gained popularity, they have often been stigmatised as leading innocent readers or audiences into dangerous states of mind. For instance, the Puritans in England in the earlier seventeenth century regarded the theatre, a dominant art form at the time, as a sink of iniquity, encouraging vice and immorality in the audiences that attended plays, while the authorities of the time often also regarded the theatre as dangerous, because it encouraged sedition and treason against the government and the monarch. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, critics inveighed against the new literary form of narrative fiction, the novel, claiming that it invited idleness and stirred up the emotions. Some even advised against allowing young women and girls to read novels, since such publications could induce hysteria and cause prolapsing of the uterus! In the past half-century, we have seen the same arguments adduced against film, television and pornography: all of these have been named as producing antisocial behaviours, summoning forth inappropriate emotions and practices, and so on.
In addition to indirectly addressing Plato’s complaints against literature, Aristotle’s Poetics sought also to analyse tragedy into its component parts, and to show how it was typically structured. This too has remained a central approach in reading and understanding literary texts, and has led to the distinguishing of various genres or types of text, based on common features, structures or purposes, as well as explorations of language use. While from about 1980 onwards these generic distinctions have been called into question—whether because they were felt to be too restrictive, or because in fact most texts draw on a range of sets of generic structures and features, thereby becoming cross-generic or generic hybrids—genre categories remain important in the publishing industry and in the ways in which booksellers set up their businesses, identifying the kinds of work (romance, science fiction, etc.) available.
‘Classics’ versus contemporary and/or popular literature
The term ‘classics’ in relation to literature has developed two key meanings. The first distinguishes between the work of the classical Greek and Roman writers and material written since classical times, while the second distinguishes between canonical literature (that is, works officially and institutionally sanctioned as great writing or good literature, and therefore often taught in the schools and universities, as well as being held up as a key cultural text; for instance, Shakespeare’s plays, Tolstoy’s War and Peace) and popular literature, a category that includes what booksellers sometimes call ‘contemporary’—that is, writing intended as serious literary work but not (yet) canonised as ‘classic’.
The distinction between Greco-Roman classics and vernacular literatures has a long history, dating back to the later Middle Ages and the emergence of vernacular literature as part of a developing sense of national identity. Accorded value because of its antiquity and its integral association with what the nineteenth-century American poet Edgar Allan Poe called ‘the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome’ (‘To Helen’), classical writing was deemed by many to have said all that there was to say, and to have said it as fluently and persuasively as possible. All subsequent writing could be only variations on that classical original. There was, inevitably, a groundswell of dissent against the pressure to use classical works and themes as the only worthwhile models for contemporary writing, a dissent that became manifest, for instance, in late seventeenth-century France in the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, its English equivalent satirically reflected in Jonathan Swift’s 1697 Battle ofthe Books.
Classical literature, however, remained ascendant until the end of the nineteenth century in the universities, where it was thought to provide an essential training in logic, criticism, history and rhetoric. The introduction of vernacular literature as a legitimate object of academic study was the result of a struggle that sought to undo the mindset which held that Classics (the capital indicating the academic field of study) was appropriate for the ‘more able’ student, whereas the study of the vernacular literature (‘English,’ as it came to be called in Britain and the US) was dismissed as appropriate only to the ‘less able’, a group which included women and working-class men, as well as those middle- and upper-class males who could not cope with Classics. One effect of the legitimation of vernacular literature as the object of academic/educational study was the canonisation of some works over the rest as ‘great literature’ or part of a national tradition. (For one account of this history of struggle, see Mathieson 1975.)
The social and cultural upheaval during and following World War I saw the foregrounding of vernacular literatures as part of the process of rebuilding the idea of the nation in the minds of the people. At the same time, given the ascendancy in the culture of science from the mid-nineteenth century onward, there was in addition an attempt to make the reading and study of literature more ‘scientific’, in opposition to the more impressionistic approach of the later nineteenth century, which assumed that the cultivated person had a natural affinity for and ‘appreciation’ of literature. I.A. Richards’s important 1929 publication Practical Critidsm, for instance, sought to establish the terms by which anyone could learn to read poetry (Richards 1964). The school of criticism that came to be called the New Criticism included such figures as F.R. and Q.D.Leavis in Britain and Cleanth Brooks in the US, the British critics tending to emphasise the moral and ethical dimensions of literature (its capacity to ‘improve’ the reader), the American ones the formal aspects (structure, rhetoric and so on).
Though there were other important theories of art and literature, such as Marxist criticism, New Criticism held sway in the English-speaking literary worlds until the late 1960s, when theories of art and literature based on different sets of assumptions and approaches began to rise in importance. These included semiotic and structuralist theories, guided initially by the work of thinkers such as Roland Barthes; new Marxist theories, inspired by Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci and others; and Russian formalism (sometimes also called Russian semiotics or structuralism), propounded by figures such as Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roman Jakobson.
Literature, genre and gender
Some categories of literature are gendered by their intended readership. Thus, for example, romance fiction is assumed to be feminine because it is largely written for female readers, whereas science fiction, now often read also by women, was until recently thought of as literary material for male readers, and hence masculine literature. It is also the case that, at different moments in a culture’s literary history, certain genres come to be dominant, and are often therefore assumed to be in some way ‘masculine’, while the remainder are distributed along a conceptual axis between masculinity and femininity. Thus, for instance, today prose fiction is the dominant literary form, and tends to be considered ‘masculine’—at any rate, male writers in the genre are not derided as feminine, which is not the case with, say, male poets, many of whom, operating within the legacy of the image of the nineteenth-century Romantic poet, are often deemed to be highly sensitive, emotionally vulnerable and therefore in some way feminised. By contrast, playwrights now appear to occupy a fairly neutral position, though of course individual plays and the work of particular playwrights may well be strongly gendered.
Indeed, nowadays the study of literature itself is sometimes seen, especially in high schools both by some students and by teaching staff, as inappropriate to aggressively masculine (‘real’) boys, so that, while literature may be thought innocuous for girls, boys who elect to study literature may be subject to derision and ridicule. At the same time, some educational systems consider literature difficult, and ironically reverse nineteenth-century practice by making the study of literature available only to the ‘more able’ student, which implicitly creates an elite (though one which, for many excluded from it, remains feminised).
For other systems in former European colonies the study of the colonial power’s literature may be seen as a nostalgic attachment to the past, which in turn may be read as a feminisation of the nation or its intelligentsia, or as an attempt to acquire mastery over the former power’s culture, which by contrast would be read as a move towards (re-)masculinisation of the nation.
Literature and the masculine
It has been argued forcefully by a number of feminist critics that, given the historical dominance by men in the culture, most literary works will tend almost inevitably to represent the masculine point of view. To counter this, many scholars have set themselves the task of uncovering and publishing works by hitherto unknown and neglected women writers.
However, the literary representation of masculinity is by no means a simple issue. Today, few readers and critics would accept the view that the literary text unproblematically reflects a prior social reality. More subtle approaches to the literary text today explore not only what the text explicitly says, but also what itfails to say—its silences and suppressions, its indirections and implications. What emerges from this is a more complex understanding of the text that is able, as is the case with a queer reading, to expose the contradictions, uncertainties and anxieties that may underlie the representation and/or construction of gender—and specifically of masculinity—in a work of literature.
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