What is Literature?

As we are going to talk about literature and all its forms in this blog, let us start our exploration with the primary question of what ‘Literature’ actually is.  It is a really broad term and it is impossible to define it within a single blog post as it is impossible to define it itself. So, today, we are going to discuss what literature is etymologically and with the help of three other theories namely – Aesthetics, Value-Judgment, and Formalism.

The word ‘literature’ is derived from the Latin word ‘littera’ which means ‘a letter of the alphabet’. If we are going to define literature by etymology, then it means literature is restricted to written forms and thus will restrict it only to the languages which have a written form.  This raises two important questions – “Is it literature only if it is written?” and “Is anything written becomes literature?”