Portal:Literature
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The Literary Portal

Literature is literally "an acquaintance with letters", as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latin littera meaning "an individual written character"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts or works of art, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and the folktale. The word "literature" as a common noun can refer to any form of writing, such as essays; "Literature" as a proper noun refers to a whole body of literary work.

The history of literature begins with the history of writing, in the Bronze Age of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, although the oldest literary texts date to a full millennium after the invention of writing, to the late 3rd millennium BC. The earliest literary authors known by name are Ptahhotep and Enheduanna, dating to ca. the 24th and 23rd centuries BC, respectively. More about Literature...

  

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Authentic Science Fiction was a British science fiction magazine published in the 1950s that ran for 85 issues under three editors: Gordon Landsborough, H.J. Campbell, and E.C. Tubb. The magazine was published by Hamilton and Co., and began in 1951 as a series of novels appearing every two weeks; by the summer it had become a monthly magazine, with readers' letters and an editorial page, though fiction content was still restricted to a single novel. In 1952 short fiction began to appear alongside the novels, and within two more years it had completed the transformation into a science fiction magazine.

Authentic published little in the way of important or ground-breaking fiction, though it did print Charles L. Harness's "The Rose", which later became well-regarded. The poor rates of pay—£1 per 1,000 words—prevented the magazine from attracting the best writers. During much of its life it competed against three other moderately successful British science fiction magazines, as well as the American science fiction magazine market. Hamilton folded the magazine in October 1957, because they needed cash to finance an investment in the UK rights to an American best-selling novel.

  

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Did you know ...

... that The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900) is an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov based on the 1831 poem The Tale of Tsar Saltan by Aleksandr Pushkin?

... that Ludwig Anzengruber's breakthrough play, Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld (1870), is about a Roman Catholic parish priest accused of having an inappropriate relationship with his household help, and that it was filmed in 1955 starring Erich Auer and Waltraut Haas?

... that "The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils" is the first line of Enoch Powell's famous "Rivers of Blood" speech?

... that Gerald Lund, Anita Stansfield and Jack Weyland write LDS fiction?

... that Quasimodo, the protagonist of Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris, is named after the first Sunday after Easter ("quasi modo geniti infantes")?

... that Owen Meany believes that the purpose of his life is being an instrument of God, and that that purpose will be fulfilled in his own death?

... that Dr Stephen Ward, Robert E. Lee, Cardinal Richelieu and Caligula are just four of the many historical personages who appear in fictional context?

  

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In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others.
André Maurois
  

A day in literature

27 July

  

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