Literature Library — Index
The art of the written and spoken word — the forms, genres, and critical methods of literature, and the great literary traditions of the world from the oldest surviving texts to the global contemporary. Sister to
VisualArts/andMusic/in the Arts group; complementsHumanities/Linguistics/(the medium),Humanities/Philosophy/aesthetics(the philosophy of art), andHumanities/History/(period context).
- Status: Tier 1 complete — 12 notes (six on form/genre/theory, six on the traditions), authored 2026-06-03.
- Conventions: named authors, works, movements, and dates throughout; titles of works in italic; no emojis. Film, the performing arts, and architecture are adjacent arts planned as their own libraries.
Tier 1 — Forms, genres, and theory
| Topic | File | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Literary theory & criticism | literary-theory-and-criticism | from Aristotle to the schools (formalism, structuralism, deconstruction, historicism, postcolonial, etc.) |
| Poetry & prosody | poetry-and-prosody | metre, rhyme, form, the lyric/epic/dramatic, the verse traditions |
| The novel & prose fiction | the-novel-and-prose-fiction | the rise of the novel, the forms of prose fiction, the short story |
| Drama & dramatic literature | drama-and-dramatic-literature | tragedy, comedy, the text as performed; Greek to the contemporary stage |
| Narrative form & genre | narrative-form-and-genre | narratology (story/discourse, focalization, time) and the genre system |
| Rhetoric, nonfiction & the essay | rhetoric-nonfiction-and-the-essay | the rhetorical tradition, the essay, life-writing, literary nonfiction |
Tier 1 — The traditions
| Topic | File | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| The Western tradition: classical to medieval | the-western-literary-tradition-classical-to-medieval | Gilgamesh & the Bible, Greece & Rome, the medieval vernaculars, Dante |
| Western literature: Renaissance to Romantic | western-literature-renaissance-to-romantic | humanism, Shakespeare & Milton, the Enlightenment, the Gothic, Romanticism |
| Western literature: modern & contemporary | western-literature-modern-and-contemporary | realism, modernism, postwar, postmodernism, the global contemporary |
| East Asian literature | east-asian-literature | Chinese, Japanese, and Korean traditions — poetry, the classic novels, the modern |
| South Asian & Middle Eastern literature | south-asian-and-middle-eastern-literature | Sanskrit, the bhakti & Urdu poets; Arabic, Persian, and Turkish letters |
| African, Latin American & world literatures | african-latin-american-and-world-literatures | oral epic, African & Caribbean writing, the Latin American Boom, postcolonial |
Adjacent libraries
- Linguistics — language itself: the writing systems, the history of languages, the medium of all literature
- VisualArts · Music — the sister arts (the period parallels move across all three)
- aesthetics — the philosophy of art, beauty, and interpretation
- History — the historical context of each literary period
- ReligiousStudies — the scriptural and devotional roots of many traditions (the Bible, the Quran, the bhakti poets, Sufism)
- culture-media-and-socialization — the literary marketplace, canon formation, the production of culture