European Oral and Epic Traditions (Critical Survey of Poetry, Second Revised Edition)
Overview
“Literature,” as the word is most often used, means written works: poetry, fiction, prose. The term itself, derived from the Latin word for “letter of the alphabet,” enshrines a particular notion of what literature involves—namely texts. The concept of a nonwritten, oral “literature,” therefore, might seem a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, before modern literate culture valued one form of language (written) above the other, before there was even any one word such as “literature” to cover the disparate forms of verbal art often tied to social...
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