The modem Western sense of literature as imaginative writing can be traced to the German Romantic theorists of the late eighteenth century and. if we want a particular source, to a book published in 1800 by a French Baroness. Madame de Stael's On Literature Considered in its Relations with Social Institutions. But even if we restrict ourselves to the last two centuries, the category of literature becomes slippery: would works which today count as literature- say poems that seem snippets of ordinary conversation. without rhyme or discernible metre have qualified as literature for Madame de Staél? And once we begin to think about non-European cultures, the question of what counts as literature becomes increasingly difficult. It is tempting to give it up i and conclude that literature is whatever a given society treats as