Literature can be defined in 3 ways: preserved writings belonging to a language or people, notable writings of a country or period distinguished by form of expression, and writings that interpret nature and life through language. Literature includes imaginative works like poems, stories and plays that present fictional situations, and non-fiction works like biographies and essays that present actual facts and ideas. Studying literature allows one to express oneself, access culture, recognize human experiences, develop perspective and values. Literature consists of various genres like fiction, poetry, drama, and essays that use different structures, audiences and presentation styles.

1. What is literature?
• Literature is the total of preserved writings
belonging to a given language or people.
• Literature is the class or the total of
writings, of a given country or period, is
which notable for literary form or
expression, as distinguished, on the one
hand, from works merely of technical or
erudite and, on the other, from journalistic
or other ephemeral writings.
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2. • Literature consists of those writings which
interpret the meanings of nature and
life, in words of charm and power, touched
with the personality of the author, in artistic
forms of permanent interests.
• It is a product of life and about life.
• It uses language as medium
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3. • Imaginative literature or “literature of power”
includes poems, short stories, novels, and
plays. It interprets human experience by
presenting fictitious persons, incidents, or
situations, not by actual truths about
particular events.
• Non-fiction or “literature of knowledge”
includes biographies and essays which
presents actual facts, events, experiences
and ideas.
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4. Why study literature?
• To express one’s self
• To have access culture
• To recognize human dreams and struggles
• To develop mature sensibility and
compassion for the condition of all creation
• To appreciate beauty
• To shape one’s own goals and values and
clarify one’s own identity
• To develop wider perspective of events
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5. Main ingredients of literature
• Subject
• Form
• Point of view
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6. Literary types or genre
• Fiction
• Essay
• Poetry
• Drama
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7. Presentation and structure of literature
GENRE AUDIENCE AUTHOR WORK
Drama group absent performed
Epic group present recited
Short story private concealed read
Novel private concealed read
Poetry ignored present recited (or
sung)
Essay private implied read
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8. Literary standards
• Artistry
• Intellectual value
• Suggestiveness
• Spiritual value
• Permanence
• Universality
• Style
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9. The Form of the Poem
• A poem is formed by means
of verses that are arranged
into a stanza or stanzas,
and that are regulated in
flow by meter and rhyme.

10. Poetry
• It is a rhythmic imaginative language
expressing the invention, thought,
imagination, taste, passion, and insight of the
human soul.
• According to William Wordsworth, it is “the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
taking its origin from “emotion recollected in
tranquility.”
• For Edgar Allan Poe, poetry is the “rhythmical
creation of beauty”
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11. Characteristics of poetry
• Rhythm
1. Meter
2. Rhyme
3. Sound devices
• Imagery
1. Figures of speech
2. Symbols
• Sense or meaning
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12. • Verse – it is a single line of a
poem. It may come short or
long but whatever, it serves as
a basic unit of stanza
• Stanza – it is a set of verses
arranged to make a part of a
poem or to serve as the poem
itself.

13. The stanza may be:
• A couplet if it has two
verses
• A tercet if it has three
• A quatrain if it has four
• A cinquain if it has five

14. A poem may also be
• A sonnet which consists of
fourteen lines
• A haiku which consists of three
verses made up of seventeen
syllables, with the first and third
verses with five syllables. The
pattern is 5-7-5.

15. Couplet
I shall haunt you, O my lost one, as the twilight
Haunts a reed-entangled trail,
“To A Lost One”
by Angela Manalang Gloria

16. Tercet
Who’er she be,
That not impossible she
That shall command my heart and me
“Wishes for the (Supposed) Mistress”
by Richard Crashaw

17. Quatrain
Gather ye rose-buds while you may
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
Tomorrow will be dying
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
by Robert Herrick

18. Cinquain
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
“The Road Not Taken”
by Robert Frost

19. Sonnet
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
“Sonnet 116”
by William Shakespeare

20. Haiku
In the flood afloat
Form a boy’s notebook, a page
Now a paper boat
“Paper Boat”
by G. Burce Bunao

21. Meter
• Meter means measure. It poetry,
the verses are measured in foot,
a measurement that is either
disyllabic or trisyllabic long. A
disyllabic foot is two syllables
long while a trisyllabic foot is
three syllables long.

22. Disyllabic foot
• The iamb – is a foot composed of
one unaccented syllable followed
by one accented syllable.
Example:
x / x / x / x /
/Thy glance/ sweet maid/ when first/ we met

23. Disyllabic foot
• The trochee – is a foot composed
of one accented syllable followed
by one unaccented syllable.
Example:
/ x / x / x / x
/Spin him/ round and/ send him/ flying

24. Disyllabic foot
• The spondee – is a foot of two
accented syllables. In a verse, it
comes in combination with other foot
as it is rare that one verse would
contain all accented syllables.
Example:
/ / x / x / x /
/Heighho/ the tale/ was all/ a lie

25. Trisyllabic foot
• The dactyl – is a foot of one
accented syllable followed by two
unaccented.
Example:
/ x x / x x
/Boldly they/ fought and well

26. Trisyllabic foot
• The anapest – is a foot of two
unaccented syllables followed by
one accented.
Example:
x x / x x / x x /
/And the sound/ of a voice/ that is still

27. • Verse differ in one another in the
number of feet they contain. If a
verse has one foot, it is called a
monometer line; it it has two
feet, a dimeter line; if it has three
feet, a trimeter line; if it has four
feet, a tetrameter line; and if it has
five feet, a pentameter line.

28. / x x / x x
/Boldly they/ fought and well/
Being a line of two feet is a dimeter
line and because each foot is a
dactyl, the line is called a dactylic
dimeter line

29. x / x / x / x /
/Thy glance/ sweet maid/ when first/ we met/
Being a line of four feet is a
tetrameter line and because each
foot is an iamb, the line is called a
iambic tetrameter line

30. • Not all verses are measured
as regularly as the previous
examples. Instead, some
verses are controlled by
some verbal devices such
as the end-stop or the run-
on.

31. The end-stop
• This is the verbal device that
makes every line of a poem
complete in thought. Thus,
causes a stop at the end of
every line, which stop serves
as the verse control.

32. The end-stop
Youth is full of pleasance,
Age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn,
Age like winter weather.
“A Madrigal”
by William Shakespeare

33. The run-on
• This is a verbal device that
makes the reading of the
verses go “running on” from
one verse to another until and
up to where the full thought is
conveyed.

34. The run-on
Lances and laces my lord
I place upon your head.
“Gifts”
by Cirilo Bautista

35. The Rhyme
• The rhyme makes the poem
musical sounding. It is the
identity of sounds within a
verse line or at the end of the
verse lines. The identity of
sound within is an internal
rhyme.

36. Internal Rhyme
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay
That made the breeze to blow.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

37. The Rhyme
• The identity of the sound at the
end of the lines is called an
end rhyme and this may be
single or masculine end rhyme
or double or feminine end
rhyme

38. The Rhyme
• There is a single or masculine rhyme
when the last pronounced syllable of
one line and the last pronounced
syllable of another line are identical.
And there is double or masculine
rhyme when the last two pronounced
syllables of one line and the last two
syllables of another line are the same.

39. She holds no joys beyond the day’s tomorrow,
She finds no worlds beyond his arms embrace,
She looks upon the Form behind the furrow
Who is her Mind, her Motion, Time, and Space
“The Spouse”
by Luis Dato
Green – double (feminine rhyme)
Red – single (masculine rhyme)

40. • Alliteration – this is a rhyme
device which makes a poem
musical sounding by the repetition
of initial consonantal sounds.
• Euphony – this is a sound quality
of a poem affected by the use of
soft, fluid, pleasing sounds.

41. Silently sifting and veiling road, roof
and railing
Having difference, making
unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting
and sailing
(Notice the alliterating s and r and the
euphonious sound of the underlined
phrases)

42. Kinds of poetry
• Lyric poetry
1. Simple lyric
2. Song (sacred or secular)
3. Sonnet
a. Italian/Petrarchan sonnet
b. English/Elizabethan/Shakespearean sonnet
c. Spenserian sonnet
4. Elegy
5. Ode
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43. • Narrative poetry
1. Ballad (folk and literary)
2. Metrical Tale
3. Metrical Romance
4. Epic
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44. Characteristics of epic
a. Broad in scope and theme; its subject matter is
often a mixture o legend, history, myth, religion and
tradition
b. The action is grand and in a huge scale, the
supernatural element is highly pronounced, the
characters are larger than life (god, demi-gods, and
highborn mortals)
c. The source of conflict involves elemental passions.
The events centers on a prodigious struggle or
effort to achieve a great purpose or carry out a great
task against powerful forces.
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45. Characteristics of epic
d. The plot consists of numerous episodes and sub-
plots people by numerous characters, each with his
own adventure and story; but all these are held
together by a unifying theme.
e. The plot often begins in medias res (in the middle or
near the end of the action) and the story is
completed by a series of flashbacks. This plot is
recounted in the epic poem is often just a portion of
a much larger story which is found in the mythology
of the nation.
f. The style is solemn and majestic in keeping with the
grandeur of the subject matter.
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46. • Dramatic poetry
1. Dramatic monologue
2. Soliloquy
3. Character sketch
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47. Prose
• Prose is discourse which uses sentences
usually forming paragraphs to express
ideas, feelings and actions. In subject
matter, prose generally concentrates on
the familiar and the ordinary. Prose is
mainly concerned with the ordinary, but it
may deal with subjects such as heroism,
beauty, love and the nobility of spirit which
usually find the most eloquent expression
in poetry.
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48. Distinction between prose and poetry
Poetry Prose
• Expresses strong • Is concerned with the
emotion or lofty thought in presentation of an idea,
a compressed and concept or point of view
intense utterance in a more ordinary and
• Its main purpose is to leisurely manner
provide pleasure and • Its purpose is to furnish
delight information, instruction, or
• It appeals to the emotion enlightenment
and imagination • It appeals to the intellect
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49. Elements of fiction
• Plot
• Setting
• Characterization
• Style
• Point of view
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50. Divisions of prose
• Novel
Bases for classification
 The novelist’s vision of life
a. Romantic fiction
b. Realistic fiction
c. Naturalistic fiction
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51. Writer’s choice of materials
a. Historical novel
b. Psychological novel
c. Social novel
 Structure of the novel
a. Panoramic novel
b. Dramatic novel
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52. Point of view
• Internal
1. The narrator is himself the protagonist or the
most important character
2. The story is told by a minor character who is
supposed to be present at the time of the
important incidents
3. Composite point of view – the reader is given
a comprehensive view of the different aspects
of the action and the different angles from
which the plot develops
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53. • External point of view – also called omniscient
point of view
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54. Short story
• It is an artistic form of prose fiction which
is centered on a single main incident and
is intended to produce a single dominant
impression.
• Economy, compression and emphasis
characterize the short story.
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55. Non-fiction
• Essay
1. Formal
2. Informal
• Oration
• Biography
• Autobiography, memoirs, letters and
epistles, diaries and journals
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56. Drama
• Tragedy
1. Serious drama
2. Tragicomedy
3. Melodrama
• Comedy
1. farce
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57. Styles of drama
• The realistic or illusionistic or
representational style
• The non-realistic or non-illusionistic or
presentational style
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58. Sources:
• Garcia, Carolina U. et al. (1993). A study of
literary types and forms. Manila: UST Publishing
House.
• Sebastian, Evelyn L. and Erlinda A. Cayao.
(2006). Readings in world literature. Quezon
City; C & E Publishing Inc.
• Tan, Arsenia B. (2001). Introduction to literature.
Fourth edition. Manila: Academic Publishing
Corporation
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