lit·er·a·ture :. The body of written works of a language, period, or culture.. Imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value: “Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity” (Rebecca West).. The art or occupation of a literary writer.. The body of written work produced by scholars or researchers in a given field: medical literature.. Printed material: collected all the available literature on the subject.. Music. All the compositions of a certain kind or for a specific instrument or ensemble: the symphonic literature.. . . Definition: written matter, artistic or on a subject. Antonyms: speech. . . Literature. . I. American Literature to 1860. . According to one version of American cultural history, there was no American literature until the second third of the nineteenth century, when, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase, "men grew reflective," and at long last "mind had become aware of itself." Explanations for the literary barrenness of early America were offered then and have been reiterated since, but all such arguments finally arise from the unexamined premise that what writing there was does not deserve the dignity of being called literature.. . II. American Literature from 1860 to 1914. . The Civil War radically changed the pace of economic and social change in the United States, but minds changed slowly. Over the years between the Civil War and the First World War, a sense of small-town security and of an idyllic past coexisted with booming industrialization, the triumph of commercialized farming at the expense of the yeoman-farmer ideal, vast migrations from Europe and from the country to the city, the emergence of new fortunes and new slums on a scale never dreamed before. The distance between cultural habit and social actuality, which did not seem great in the 1870s and 1880s, gradually widened, bringing about that split between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" that Van Wyck Brooks was to proclaim in America's Coming of Age in 1915. The cultural split was reinforced by the widespread assumption of gender-related difference, sensibility and cultivation allegedly being "feminine" and practicality and tough-mindedness "masculine." (A curious blend of stereotype and subversion was Louisa May Alcott's Little Women [1868-1869], in which domestic survival depends on female practicality and is endangered by male incompetence.). . III. American Literature since 1914. . In the second decade of the century the new literary insurgencies on the American scene, however much they may in one particular or another have been uncertain of their aim, knew that at least their mission needed to involve the subversion of what George Santayana in 1911 had called the "genteel tradition." The generation of such writers as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Theodore Dreiser, of Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson, of H. L. Mencken and William Carlos Williams, was convinced that it needed to distance itself from the timidities and pieties that had for too long subdued and tamed the major voices of American tradition. A milieu increasingly shaped by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had to be reckoned with in ways that Harper's and the Atlantic and Scribner's and the Century could not be expected to approve of. So new forums began to appear--Poetry in 1912, the Little Review and the New Republic in 1914, Others in 1915, the Seven Arts in 1916, and Contact and the Dial in 1920; and it was such periodicals that undertook to provide a hearing for the avant-garde that came to the fore in these years.. . Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latin littera meaning "an individual written character (letter)"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts, which in Western culture are m