The term "literature," from the Latin littera meaning an individual written character or letter),originally meant simply an "acquaintance with letters. In the eighteenth century, the word underwent a transformation into Literature with a capital "L," and has generally come to identify a collection of texts which are considered work of art, consisting, in Western culture, primarily of prose (both fiction and non-fiction), poetry, and drama.

Here is a quote from Alvin Kernan, which describes some of the assumptions post-Romantic readers have had about the category "Literature." Kernan is useful here because he foregrounds the historicity of Literature both as a category for grouping texts, and as a set of concepts about the nature of man and his place in the world. Kernan's observations suggest that, rather than following the encyclopaedic impulse to produce a static and exhaustive definition for the term literature, we should in fact produce a more fluid genealogical account of how this category was formed over time and the ways in which it has changed since its first establishment. Indeed, if the Romantics erased the social roots of literary production, can we now begin to say that the age of digital communications networks has re-socialized literary work?

"Romantic art, including literature, has presented itself for about two hundred years now, in terms of transcendencies, locating its origins, finding its language, and explaining its functions in the deeps of the unconscious self, the cosmic struggles of Apollonian and Dionysiac energies, the ancient myths of edenic past and apocalyptic future, darkling Oedipal wrestlings with precursor poets and, most recently, the emptiness of the abyss. Centered in these worlds of spirit, romantic literature offered itself to the world, with at least some success, as a manifestation of an unchanging and distinctively human psychic essence, an epistemological and linguistic absolute, a Universalpoesie, the true voice of mankind appearing in all cultures at all times. In th course of the nineteenth century, these concepts came to seem so real and so true as to be unquestionable, facts rather than concepts. As this happened, literature concealed its social origins and denied its social existence, becoming a group of sacred texts that, as the products of the imagination speaking its primary language of metaphor, symbol and irony, manifest its essential humanity."

Some more quotes from this post-romantic era of "Capital L - Literature":

“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost degree.” -George Orwell

“Literature is the question minus the answer.”—Roland Barthes

“Literature is an answer to the questions that society asks about itself, but this answer is almost always unexpected.”—Octavio Paz, 1990 winner of the Nobel Prize in . . . you guessed it.