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, and including 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, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.
Literature, as an art form, can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography, diaries, memoir, 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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Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War".
Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies were sold in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." In recent years, however, negative associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool."
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More Did you know
- ... that Samuel Minturn Peck was the first Poet Laureate of Alabama, a title created for him, from 1930 until his death in 1938?
- ... that James McBride was described as "clearly stunned" when his novel The Good Lord Bird won the National Book Award for Fiction?
- ... that Arishima Ikuma, Japanese novelist, published his new-style poems and short stories as a vehicle to introduce the works of the French impressionist painter Paul Cézanne to the Japanese public?
- ... that German-born Jewish Egyptologist Käte Bosse-Griffiths published a novel in the Welsh language?
- ... that John Fowles' postmodern novel The French Lieutenant's Woman both emulated and parodied popular Victorian novels, like those of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy?
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- ... that the pastor John Littlejohn went from selling pornographic literature to sailors as a youth to protecting the Declaration of Independence?
- ... that Malaysian poet Wong Phui Nam wrote in English, despite feeling no connection to the English literary tradition?
- ... that Bulkboeken ('bulk books') were cheap reprints of Dutch literary classics, published from 1971 to the late 1990s, and again from 2007?
- ... that Hammersmith by Gustav Holst was acclaimed by Frederick Fennell for having "some of the most treacherous stretches of music making" in band literature?
- ... that the cultural scholar Hermann Bausinger wrote a book about the history of literature from Swabia from the 18th century to the present, published for his 90th birthday?
- ... that Edo literature was influenced by British colonialism in the late 19th century, which introduced the Roman script and Christianity to the Edo people?
Today in literature
- 1687 - Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
- 1889 - Jean Cocteau, French writer born
- 1904 - Abai Kunanbaiuli, Kazakh poet died
- 1908 - Jonas Lie, Norwegian author died
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