Portal:Literature
Introduction
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. It includes both print and digital writing. 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. It can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.
The term is sometimes used synonymously with literary fiction, which encompasses fiction written with the goal of literary merit.Literature, as an art form, can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography, diaries, memoirs, letters, and essays. Within its broad definition, literature includes non-fictional books, articles, or other written information on a particular subject. (Full article...)
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El Señor Presidente (Mister President) is a 1946 novel written in Spanish by Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974). A landmark text in Latin American literature, El Señor Presidente explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias makes early use of a literary technique now known as magic realism. One of the most notable works of the dictator novel genre, El Señor Presidente developed from an earlier Asturias short story, written to protest social injustice in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the author's home town.
Although El Señor Presidente does not explicitly identify its setting as early twentieth-century Guatemala, the novel's title character was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Asturias began writing the novel in the 1920s and finished it in 1933, but the strict censorship policies of Guatemalan dictatorial governments delayed its publication for thirteen years.
On its eventual publication in Mexico in 1946, El Señor Presidente quickly met with critical acclaim. In 1967, Asturias received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his entire body of work. This international acknowledgment was celebrated throughout Latin America, where it was seen as a recognition of the region's literature as a whole.
Selected excerpt
“ | Something incomprehensible, vexatious and hopeless takes possession of the man's whole being. He forgets his comrade who is awaiting him, forgets the work that is to be accomplished that night, and with his whole excited spirit abandons himself to the dumb dog. He cannot convince himself that the dog does not comprehend either the danger, or his words, or the necessity of going home at once. He lifts him angrily by the skin of his neck and so carries him ten steps nearer to the house. There he deposits him carefully on the snow and commands: "Away with you, go home!" | ” |
— Leonid Andreyev, The Burglar |
More Did you know
- ... that Danilo Kiš's 1965 novel Garden, Ashes mixes fact and fiction, with both the narrator and the author having lost their fathers in the Holocaust?
- ... that in Lady of Sherwood, Jennifer Roberson chose to write about the demise of Richard I because the "death of a popular monarch always provide fodder for novelists"?
- ... that blind poet María Josefa Mujía was Bolivia's first woman writer after its independence?
- ... that De Scheepsjongens van Bontekoe, the 1924 Dutch children's book based on a real-life shipwreck in 1618, has sold more than 250,000 copies?
- ... that Iosif Vulcan changed the name of a young literary debutant to Mihai Eminescu, later Romania's national poet?
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Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that 19th-century Polish ethnographer Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski travelled the countryside as a "wild man" and later appeared as a literary character?
- ... that literary fiction novel Agatha of Little Neon's title stems from a house that is "the color of Mountain Dew"?
- ... that in her 2021 book The Origins of Early Christian Literature, Robyn Faith Walsh found that German Romanticists were in part responsible for modern scholarly assumptions about the gospels?
- ... that more than 1000 tons of paper were used every year printing car literature for the British Motor Corporation by the in-house Nuffield Press?
- ... that the pastor John Littlejohn went from selling pornographic literature to sailors as a youth to protecting the Declaration of Independence?
- ... that a study of Anglo-Saxon literature begun by Bernard Pitt in 1914 was completed by a colleague after Pitt was killed in the First World War?
Today in literature
- 19 BC - Virgil, Roman poet died
- 1542 - Juan Boscán Almogáver, Spanish poet died
- 1719 - Johann Heinrich Acker, German writer died
- 1832 - Sir Walter Scott, Scottish writer died
- 1866 - H. G. Wells, English writer born
- 1895 - Sergei Yesenin, Russian poet born
- 1902 - Luis Cernuda, Spanish poet born
- 1937 - J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is published.
- 1938 - Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić Croatian writer died
- 1944 - Fannie Flagg, American actress and novelist born
- 1947 - Stephen King, American author born
- 1947 - Marsha Norman, American playwright born
- 1972 - Henry de Montherlant, French writer died
- 1974 - Jacqueline Susann, American novelist died
- 2002 - Robert Forward, American writer died
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