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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"The Open Boat" is a short story by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). First published in 1897, it was based on Crane's experience of surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida earlier that year while traveling to Cuba to work as a newspaper correspondent. Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours when his ship, the SS Commodore, sank after hitting a sandbar. He and three other men were forced to navigate their way to shore in a small boat; one of the men, an oiler named Billie Higgins, drowned after the boat overturned. Crane's personal account of the shipwreck and the men's survival, titled "Stephen Crane's Own Story", was first published a few days after his rescue.
Crane subsequently adapted his report into narrative form, and the resulting short story "The Open Boat" was published in Scribner's Magazine. The story is told from the point of view of an anonymous correspondent, with Crane as the implied author, the action closely resembles the author's experiences after the shipwreck. Praised for its innovation by contemporary critics, the story is considered an exemplary work of literary Naturalism, and is one of the most frequently discussed works in Crane's canon.
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“ | The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee ; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy. |
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— Emily Dickinson, "The pedigree of Honey" |
More Did you know
- ... that the reality television poetry competition Prince of Poets is more popular than football in countries of the Arab world, where it airs?
- ... that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won a record-tying seven Olivier Awards at the 2013 Laurence Olivier Awards on April 28, 2013?
- ... that Berit Brænne's first children's book, from 1958, is a story about a sailor's family who adopted children from different parts of the world?
- ... that the 1934 Jeanne Galzy novel Jeunes filles en serre chaude, with its seductive title, was deemed to contain "dangerous aberrations" and "strong emotional reaction[s] of an undesirable nature"?
- ... that Fu Sheng was credited with saving the Confucian classic Book of Documents from the book burning of the First Emperor of China?
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- ... that the literary magazine Adabijoti Soveti was the sole remaining publication in the Jewish-Bukharian language by the time of the switch to the Cyrillic script in 1939–1940?
- ... 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 Super Mario 64 has been the subject of medical literature showing a correlation between habitual playing of 3D platformers and increased grey matter in the brain?
- ... that Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski – considered "the founding father of Polish literature" – wrote threnodies, the first Polish-language tragedy, and epigrams?
- ... that History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brothers in the Caribbean by C. G. A. Oldendorp was the first book to publish Igbo-language terms in 1777?
- ... that literary agent Jacques Chambrun sold unauthorized, scandalous excerpts of a Marilyn Monroe memoir to a British tabloid?
Today in literature
- 1752 - Fanny Burney, English novelist and diarist born
- 1865 - William Butler Yeats, Irish writer, Nobel Prize laureate born
- 1887 - Bruno Frank, German author born
- 1888 - Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese poet born
- 1893 - Dorothy L. Sayers, English author born
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