An overview of Literature by WAJID ALI Part 1.

What is literature?

Literature is a specific term that is used to describe written as well as spoken material. The word literature is derived from a Latin word “Litera” which means writing formed with letters. Literature is the combination of written, oral, or visual work that portrays thoughts, feelings, emotions, experiences, and sufferings of human. Literature simply refers to the reflection of society.

Literature is a fine art, like music, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture etc. The main purpose of literature is to give aesthetic pleasure. There are two types of literature, applied literature and pure literature. Further I’ll explain both of these types in detail.

The historical background of literature:

There are many myths about the origin of world’s literature. But we don’t know exactly about its origin. According to some experts and scholars, the earliest example of written literature originated in Mesopotamia (a Greek term, meaning between two rivers, or a historical region of Western Asia and middle east).

 The Sumerian civilization (an ancient civilization founded in the Mesopotamia region) first developed writing around 3400 B.C, when they started marking on clay tablets in a script known as cuneiform (earliest system of writing on clay). Mostly, those scripts consisted economic and administrated documents.