Most often, literature is understood as fiction, that is, literature as an art form. However, this modern understanding should not be directly applied to the culture of eras that are distant from the present day. Ancient scientific treatises and religious and mythological writings. Lucretius – from the point of view of his contemporaries, they were not opposed as non-fiction to fiction. Separating fiction of other periods from religious, philosophical, scientific, journalistic literature, we project our modern ideas into the past.
Nevertheless, literature has a number of universal properties that are unchanged in all national cultures and throughout human history, although each of these properties is associated with certain problems and reservations.
Literature includes author’s texts (including anonymous, that is, those whose author is unknown for one reason or another, and collective, that is, written by a group of people – sometimes quite numerous, if we are talking, for example, about an encyclopedia, but still certain). The fact that the text belongs to a certain author, was created by him, is important in this case not from a legal point of view (cf. copyright) and not from a psychological point of view (the author is as a living person, information about which the reader can try to extract from the text being read), and therefore that the presence of a certain author in the text provides this text with completeness: the author puts the last point, and after that the text begins to exist on its own.
The history of culture knows the types of texts that exist according to other rules, for example, folklore: due to the lack of authorship, the text itself is not finally fixed, and the one who retells or rewrites it again is free to make changes to it, sometimes quite significant ones. Some or other records of such a text may be associated with the name of the writer or scientist who made such a record, however, such a literary fixation of a non-literary text does not negate the possibility of the existence of other versions of it, and the author of such a record belongs to this record, and not the fairy tale itself.
Another property is connected with the previous property: literature includes written texts and does not include oral ones. Oral creativity historically precedes writing and before, unlike written, did not lend itself to fixation. Folklore has always been oral. Modernity knows, however, transitional and borderline cases. So, in national cultures that made a big leap in development in the 20th century, storytellers engaged in oral creativity have been or are being preserved – before such songs would have gone into folklore and existed in it, changing and developing in the mouths of other performers, but in recent times, compositions … Another way of converting oral creativity into writing is the so-called “literary record”.
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