WhatisLiterature..doc

What is Literature? If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something called literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature? Various attempts to define literature. You can define it, for example, as ‘imaginative writing in the sense of fiction - writing which is not literally true. But even the briefest reflection on what people commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do. Seventeenth-century English literature include Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyans spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch be taken to encompass Hobbess Leviathan（霍布斯的《利维坦》） or Glarendons History of the Rebellion.（克拉仁登的《反叛的历史》） French seventeenth-century literature contains, along with Corneille（高乃依） and Racine（拉辛）, La Rochefoucaulds（拉罗什福柯） maxims, Bossuets（博絮埃） funeral speeches, Boileaus （布瓦洛）treatise on poetry, Madame de Sevigne’s（赛维尼太太） letters to her daughter and the philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes Lamb（兰姆） (though not Bentham（边沁）), Macaulay (but not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).（非文学与文学有边界吗） ?? A distinction between fact and fiction, then, seems unlikely to get us very far, not least because the distinction itself is often a questionable one. It has been argued, for instance, that our own opposition between historical and artistic truth does not apply at all to the early Icelandic sagas) In the English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word novel seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and even news reports were hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news reports were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp discriminations between these categories simply did not appl