Importance of Literature

The word in its broadest sense refers to collected written material on a particular topic. For instance if you wanted to know more about art and its impact on society then you would go to a library and collect all the books related to that topic. All that material on art is referred to as literature. This essay is to discuss the other aspect of the word, literature, the facet that refers to writings through ages by different people and by famous authors and the impact that books have on the world.

Literature perhaps started with man discovering his ability to create. When this happened he realized that he could not only express his emotions in writing but in the process convey messages of import to society carefully hidden in beautiful words. He decided that he could play with words to entertain people who would read them. In the olden days distance was of course a problem and so maintaining a history of worldliterature was impossible. The flip side is that we have a wide range of literature to read from. People in different parts of the world, using different languages and writing in different periods of time tackled literature differently. This has left us with books and creations that enrich our society, our heritage as a race and us. Even the most voracious reader can never hope to read all the books out there.

Literature is not only a storehouse of creativity. Through its topics of discussion literature is also a take on the history of the world. Dealing as it does with language it is also, a repository of the history of language. Ancient literatures like those of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Aryan, Dravidan and the like help us learn how these languages have evolved through time and through the ravages of the different cultures conquering them. Literature has also helped preserve for man the different schools of thought,Sophism to Modernism, the Dead Sea scrolls to Structuralism.

Literature is usually defined as man’s way of communicating with society breaking barriers that usually divide men, those of caste, color, time, gender, status and the like. It is sometimes ‘…a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, or a puzzle to be solved by reading using a context of all that went before and all accrued experiences of the reader.

The theory of literature is commonly believed to have started with Aristotle when he propounded how a good work of art should be written. His views on the written word’s structure, its characters, its style all formed the basis of literary theory. Since then many theorists have either in agreeing or refuting or digressing from him given their own theories about literature and its study.