Portal:Literature
Introduction
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose, fiction, drama, poetry, and including both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, also known as orature much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.
Literature, as an art form, can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography, diaries, memoir, letters, and essays. Within its broad definition, literature includes non-fictional books, articles or other written information on a particular subject. (Full article...)
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La Cousine Bette is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and torment a series of men. One of these is Baron Hector Hulot, husband to Bette's cousin Adeline. He sacrifices his family's fortune and good name to please Valérie, who leaves him for a tradesman named Crevel. The book is part of the Scènes de la vie parisienne section of Balzac's novel sequence La Comédie humaine ("The Human Comedy").
The novel's characters represent polarities of contrasting morality. The vengeful Bette and disingenuous Valérie stand on one side, with the merciful Adeline and her patient daughter Hortense on the other. The patriarch of the Hulot family, meanwhile, is consumed by his own sexual desire. Hortense's husband, the Polish exile Wenceslas Steinbock, represents artistic genius, though he succumbs to uncertainty and lack of motivation. Balzac based the character of Bette in part on his mother and the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. At least one scene involving Baron Hulot was likely based on an event in the life of Balzac's friend, the novelist Victor Hugo.
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“ | The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. | ” |
— H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu |
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- ... that Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes' play Octavia Bragaldi moves the Kentucky Tragedy from 1825 to 15th century Milan?
- ... that novelist Shirley Barker's first book of poetry enraged poet Robert Frost?
- ... that Shackles was the first Indonesian novel to portray a prostitute sympathetically?
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Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that in the Forum of Augustus in Rome, elogia were hung on statues of commanders and Augustus's ancestors?
- ... that the pastor John Littlejohn went from selling pornographic literature to sailors as a youth to protecting the Declaration of Independence?
- ... that a teacher of medieval literature and comic books writes the blog Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle?
- ... that Cathie Dunsford was unable to find many books about lesbianism in the 1970s, but by the 1980s had herself become a writer and anthologist of lesbian literature?
- ... that 19th-century Polish ethnographer Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski travelled the countryside as a "wild man" and later appeared as a literary character?
- ... that the poet Fernando Pessoa considered Alberto Caeiro, one of his own heteronyms, to be his master?
Today in literature
- 1668 - Alain-René Lesage, French writer born
- 1858 - John Meade Falkner, English novelist born
- 1895 - Edmund Wilson, American writer born
- 1914 - Romain Gary, Polish writer born
- 1920 - Sloan Wilson, American author born
- 1928 - Theodore Sorensen, American writer born
- 1963 - Robin Jarvis, British writer born
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