Initsmodernformtheconceptof“li-考网

In its modern form the concept of “literature” did not emerge earlier than the eighteenth century and was not fully developed until the nineteenth century. Yet the conditions for its emergence had been developing since the Renaissance. The word itself came into English use in the fourteenth century, following French and Latin precedents; its root was Latin?littera, a letter of the alphabet.?Litterature, in the common early spelling, was then in effect a condition of reading: of being able to read and of having read. It was often close to the sense of modern?literacy, which was not in the language until the late nineteenth century, its introduction in part made necessary by the movement of?literature?to a different sense. The normal adjective associated with literature was?literate. Literary appeared in the sense of reading ability and experience in the seventeenth century, and did not acquire its specialized modern meaning until the eighteenth century.

　　Literature?as a new category was then a specialization of the area formerly categorized as?rhetoric?and?grammar: a specialization to reading and, in the material context of the development of printing, to the printed word and especially the book. It was eventually to become a more general category than?poetry?or the earlier?poesy, which had been general terms for imaginative composition, but which in relation to the development of?literaturebecame predominantly specialized, from the seventeenth century, to metrical composition and especially written and printed metrical composition. But literature was never primarily the active composition─the “making”─which poetry had described. As reading rather than writing, it was a category of a different kind. The characteristic use can be seen in Bacon “learned in all literature and erudition, divine and humane”─and as late as Johnson “he had probably more than common literature, as his son addresses him in one of his most elaborate Latin poems.”?Literature, that is

A.The emergence of novels
B.The emergence of dramas
C.The emergence of poems
D.The emergence of essays

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答案： B

本题解析：

由倒数第二段Was drama literature?...If literature was reading, could a mode written for spoken performance be said to be literature...可知，对于literature的阅读内涵提出挑战的是戏剧这一以表演为形式的创作。