ABSTRACT
The term “literature” might seem so vague and contested as to be a blunt instrument in aesthetics. In its widest sense, it is applied to virtually all printed matter, as when we speak of the literature on the iPad. Other usages are narrower, implying a kind of value. Thus literature is seen as “belles-lettres” or “fine writing,” wherever that might be found; it might include the King James Bible or Hume’s History of England, as well as certain philosophical or theological treatises, and biographies, memoirs, letters, even some journalism. When Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature this second usage was assumed. A third usage is narrower still and brings us nearest to aesthetics. Here “literature” denotes “works of the imagination” and is largely a modern (post-eighteenth-century) innovation. Thus some, but not all, poems, novels, dramas, short stories, sagas, legends, satires, would be included, while more fact-oriented writing of the kind listed above would be excluded. This third usage is strictly a subclass of the second for the evaluative component of “literary merit” still applies. Not all works of the imagination are deemed to be “literature,” in this sense, and much popular fiction or drama or light verse would not be so classified. Publishers have come to recognize a particular genre of fiction as “literary” fiction, in contrast to other genres, crime, fantasy, horror, war, science fiction, which are rarely classed as “literature.” What these other genres are thought to lack, as well as “fine writing,” is a kind of broader significance or seriousness, which is taken as a further essential mark of “imaginative literature” in its honorific sense.
