Introduction: What is Literature?, p. 2
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Context: Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
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Peggy Noonan 16
American author and journalist 1950Related quotes
Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)
Context: Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
On Winston Churchill http://www.amazon.com/review/R7UQOFFBBBUNN/
Section 4.5 <!-- p. 202 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
Hawthorne http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/hjj/nhhj1.html, (1879) ch. I: The Early Years.
“The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 386.
Source: On Tulsidas’s epic Ramacharritamanas, P.E.Keay in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 35
"Preface to Poems" (1854)
"Religion and Literature" (1935), in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)