ABSTRACT
What is literature? For some scholars literature is a generic term for aural, written and sung expression in all its forms across history – from Greek tragedies and medieval chansons to Shakespearean sonnets to contemporary music. Intrinsic to every human culture, literature is seen as a particular way of using language to create another world, an imagined elsewhere made real through storytelling or narration. These linguistic creations are intrinsic to all human cultures because human culture is created through language and language is never merely a way of naming the things in the world; language itself creates non-referential spaces of symbolic play. But for other scholars, literature is a recent phenomenon born in the eighteenth century with the invention of the modern printing press and the emergence of modern reading publics. And, as an art form born in the industrial age, literature is passé, superseded along with the book by the new creative spaces and forms that have emerged in the digital age.
