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, 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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"Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just twice. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway's sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon.
The story is one of Hemingway's earliest pieces to employ his Iceberg Theory of writing; a modernist approach to prose in which the underlying meaning is hinted at, rather than explicitly stated. "Big Two-Hearted River" is almost exclusively descriptive and intentionally devoid of plot. Hemingway was influenced by the visual innovations of Cézanne's paintings and adapted the painter's idea of presenting background minutiae in lower focus than the main image. In this story, the small details of a fishing trip are explored in great depth, while the landscape setting, and most obviously the swamp, are given cursory attention.
Selected excerpt
“ | I don’t know why it should be so, but it is an undeniable fact that there is nothing makes a man look so supremely ridiculous as losing his hat. The feeling of helpless misery that shoots down one’s back on suddenly becoming aware that one’s head is bare is among the most bitter ills that flesh is heir to. And then there is the wild chase after it, accompanied by an excitable small dog, who thinks it is a game, and in the course of which you are certain to upset three or four innocent children—to say nothing of their mothers—butt a fat old gentleman on to the top of a perambulator, and carom off a ladies’ seminary into the arms of a wet sweep. | ” |
— Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow |
More Did you know
- ... that in Juliet H. Lewis Campbell's novel Eros and Antieros the hero raises and marries the daughter of his unrequited love?
- ... that protests were organized against and calls were made out to expel writer Ekrem Eylisli from his native Azerbaijan following the publication of his novella?
- ... that most epic poems about the Babi Yar massacres were written by Russian and Ukrainian Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust?
- ... that Charles Stross's science-fiction novel Singularity Sky inspired a proposal to undermine the Taliban by giving every Afghan a free mobile phone?
- ... that after having written a poem on the 1625 great plague of London, the poet Abraham Holland died of the plague the following year?
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Did you know (auto-generated) -
- ... that the North-Western Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) ran an underground network to distribute literature to German soldiers in occupied areas?
- ... that despite a career writing queer literature, Chen Xue's 2019 novel Fatherless City had a "putatively straight premise"?
- ... that Al-Wishah fi Fawa'id al-Nikah, a 15th-century Islamic sex manual by Egyptian writer Al-Suyuti, was based on both traditional hadith literature and material influenced by Indian erotology?
- ... that Bulkboeken ('bulk books') were cheap reprints of Dutch literary classics, published from 1971 to the late 1990s, and again from 2007?
- ... that Malaysian poet Wong Phui Nam wrote in English, despite feeling no connection to the English literary tradition?
- ... that Charles Larson became one of the first Americans to teach African literature, after working in Nigeria for the Peace Corps to avoid the Vietnam draft?
Today in literature
- 1688 - Alexander Pope, English poet born
- 1880 - Tudor Arghezi, Romanian writer born
- 1916 - Harold Robbins, American novelist born
- 1926 - Robert Creeley, American poet born
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