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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. [1] It includes both print and digital writing. [2] In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed.
The Structure of Literature is a 1954 book of literary criticism by Paul Goodman, the published version of his doctoral dissertation in the humanities.The book proposes a mode of formal literary analysis that Goodman calls "inductive formal analysis": Goodman defines a formal structure within an isolated literary work, finds how parts of the work interact with each other to form a whole, and ...
A text must necessarily be thought of as incomplete, indeed as missing something crucial that provides the mechanics of understanding. The text is always partially hidden; one word for the hidden part in literary theory is the subtext. [7] The concept of the text in structuralism requires a relatively simple relationship between language and ...
In literary theory, a text is any object that can be "read", whether this object is a work of literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block, or styles of clothing. [ citation needed ] It is a set of signs that is available to be reconstructed by a reader (or observer) if sufficient interpretants are available.
A theme may be exemplified by the actions, utterances, or thoughts of a character in a novel. An example of this would be the thematic idea of loneliness in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, wherein many of the characters seem to be lonely. It may differ from the thesis—the text's or author's implied worldview. [4] [example needed]
Factual texts merely seek to inform, whereas literary texts seek to entertain or otherwise engage the reader by using creative language and imagery. There are many aspects to literary writing, and many ways to analyse it, but four basic categories are descriptive, narrative, expository, and argumentative.
Expository writing is a type of writing where the purpose is to explain or inform the audience about a topic. [13] It is considered one of the four most common rhetorical modes. [14] The purpose of expository writing is to explain and analyze information by presenting an idea, relevant evidence, and appropriate discussion.
Literature has its own history, a history of innovation in formal structures, and is not determined (as some crude versions of Marxism have it) by external, material history. What a work of literature says cannot be separated from how the literary work says it, and therefore the form of a work, far from being merely the decorative wrapping of ...