Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings

specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. 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, and 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, memoir, letters, and essays. Within its broad definition, literature includes
non-fictional books, articles or other printed information on a particular subject.Etymologically,
the term derives from Latin literatura/litteraturacode: lat promoted to code: la "learning, a
writing, grammar," originally "writing formed with letters," from litera/litteracode: lat promoted
to code: la "letter". In spite of this, the term has also been applied to spoken or sung texts.
Literature is often referred to synecdochically as "writing," and poetically as "the craft of
writing" or simply "the craft." Syd Field described his discipline, screenwriting, as "a craft that
occasionally rises to the level of art."Developments in print technology have allowed an ever-
growing distribution and proliferation of written works, which now includes electronic literature.

Definitions
Definitions of literature have varied over time. In Western Europe, prior to the 18th century,
literature denoted all books and writing. Literature can be seen as returning to older, more
inclusive notions, so that cultural studies, for instance, include, in addition to canonical works,
popular and minority genres. The word is also used in reference to non-written works: to "oral
literature" and "the literature of preliterate culture".

A value judgment definition of literature considers it as consisting solely of high quality writing
that forms part of the belles-lettres ("fine writing") tradition. An example of this is in the (1910–
11) Encyclopædia Britannica that classified literature as "the best expression of the best thought
reduced to writing".

History
Oral literature

The use of the term "literature" here is a little problematic because of its origins in the Latin
littera, “letter,” essentially writing. Alternatives such as "oral forms" and "oral genres" have been
suggested but the word literature is widely used.Oral literature is an ancient human tradition
found in "all corners of the world". Modern archaeology has been unveiling evidence of the
human efforts to preserve and transmit arts and knowledge that depended completely or partially
on an oral tradition, across various cultures:

The Judeo-Christian Bible reveals its oral traditional roots; medieval European manuscripts are
penned by performing scribes; geometric vases from archaic Greece mirror Homer's oral style.
(...) Indeed, if these final decades of the millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral
tradition never was the other we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary
technology of communication we thought it to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition
stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a
historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality.

The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering
history, genealogy, and law.In Asia, the transmission of folklore, mythologies as well as
scriptures in ancient India, in different Indian religions, was by oral tradition, preserved with
precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques.The early Buddhist texts are also
generally believed to be of oral tradition, with the first by comparing inconsistencies in the
transmitted versions of literature from various oral societies such as the Greek, Serbia and other
cultures, then noting that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have been composed
and transmitted orally across generations, without being written down. According to Goody, the
Vedic texts likely involved both a written and oral tradition, calling it a "parallel products of a
literate society".Australian Aboriginal culture has thrived on oral traditions and oral histories
passed down through thousands of years.

In a study published in February 2020, new evidence showed that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill
volcanoes erupted between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago. Significantly, this is a "minimum age
constraint for human presence in Victoria", and also could be interpreted as evidence for the oral
histories of the Gunditjmara people, an Aboriginal Australian people of south-western Victoria,
which tell of volcanic eruptions being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence. An axe
found underneath volcanic ash in 1947 had already proven that humans inhabited the region
before the eruption of Tower Hill.All ancient Greek literature was to some degree oral in nature,
and the earliest literature was completely so. Homer's epic poetry, states Michael Gagarin, was
largely composed, performed and transmitted orally. As folklores and legends were performed in
front of distant audiences, the singers would substitute the names in the stories with local
characters or rulers to give the stories a local flavor and thus connect with the audience, but
making the historicity embedded in the oral tradition as unreliable. The lack of surviving texts
about the Greek and Roman religious traditions have led scholars to presume that these were
ritualistic and transmitted as oral traditions, but some scholars disagree that the complex rituals
in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were an exclusive product of an oral
tradition.Writing systems are not known to have existed among Native North Americans before
contact with Europeans. Oral storytelling traditions flourished in a context without the use of
writing to record and preserve history, scientific knowledge, and social practices. While some
stories were told for amusement and leisure, most functioned as practical lessons from tribal
experience applied to immediate moral, social, psychological, and environmental issues. Stories
fuse fictional, supernatural, or otherwise exaggerated characters and circumstances with real
emotions and morals as a means of teaching. Plots often reflect real life situations and may be
aimed at particular people known by the story's audience. In this way, social pressure could be
exerted without directly causing embarrassment or social exclusion. For example, rather than
yelling, Inuit parents might deter their children from wandering too close to the water's edge by
telling a story about a sea monster with a pouch for children within its reach.See also African
literature#Oral literature

Oratory
Oratory or the art of public speaking "was for long considered a literary art". From Ancient
Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education in training
orators, lawyers, counselors, historians, statesmen, and poets.

Writing

Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia
outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and
presenting transactions in a permanent form. Though in both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica,
writing may have already emerged because of the need to record historical and environmental
events. Subsequent innovations included more uniform, predictable, legal systems, sacred texts,
and the origins of modern practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge-consolidation, all largely
reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of writing.