The modern 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 Staël’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 Staël? 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
and conclude that literature is whatever a given society treats as
What is Literature and Does it Matter?
literature – a set of texts that cultural arbiters recognize as belonging
to literature.