Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each claim by whether it belongs to the OLD sense of "literature" (learning in general) or the MODERN sense (imaginative writing).
Groups: Old sense · Modern sense
- Scientific writing is excluded by definition
- Gibbon's history belongs to it as a matter of course
- It consolidates around 1800
- A man of great literature, meaning well read
- The novel, the poem and the play form one family
Hints
- One sense describes a reader; the other describes a shelf.
- The exclusion of scientific and historical writing is the modern move.
Show the answer
Old sense: A man of great literature, meaning well read, Gibbon's history belongs to it as a matter of course
Modern sense: The novel, the poem and the play form one family, Scientific writing is excluded by definition, It consolidates around 1800
Why
The shift is from a property of readers to a class of texts, and it happens alongside Romanticism, the rise of the novel and the professionalisation of science. Once the category exists, everything outside it is implicitly denied creativity, which is the cost Williams draws attention to.
Practise Literary Study Among the Disciplines
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More questions on Literary Study Among the Disciplines
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