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The Instructions, a form of wisdom literature that was popular during most of Ancient Egyptian history, taught maxims of Ancient Egyptian philosophy that combined pragmatic thought and religious speculation. [7] These literary traditions continued to develop in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt as autobiographies
Literary movements are a way to divide literature into categories of similar philosophical, topical, or aesthetic features, as opposed to divisions by genre or period. Like other categorizations, literary movements provide language for comparing and discussing literary works. These terms are helpful for curricula or anthologies. [1]
Literary fiction can be considered an example of "high culture" and contrasted with "popular culture" and "mass culture". [ 21 ] [ 10 ] The poet and critic Matthew Arnold defined "culture", in Culture and Anarchy (1869), as "the disinterested endeavour after man's perfection" pursued, obtained, and achieved by effort to "know the best that has ...
However, the nebulous definitions assigned to even the long-standing ancient epics due to their ubiquitous presence across vastly differing cultures and traditions, are still a topic of discourse for today's literary academics, and have caused lingering difficulties in creating a definitive definition for the umbrella term of “epic” as a genre.
As a literary genre of high culture, "heroic romance" or "chivalric romance" is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalric knight-errant portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest.
The first epics were products of preliterate societies and oral history poetic traditions. [citation needed] Oral tradition was used alongside written scriptures to communicate and facilitate the spread of culture. [11] In these traditions, poetry is transmitted to the audience and from performer to performer by purely oral means.
Poetic tradition is a concept similar to that of the poetic or literary canon (a body of works of significant literary merit, instrumental in shaping Western culture and modes of thought). The concept of poetic tradition has been commonly used as a part of historical literary criticism, in which a poet or author is evaluated in the context of ...
A traditional Kyrgyz manaschi performing part of the Epic of Manas at a yurt camp in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan. The use of the term "literature" here poses some issues due to 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.