Klarer (2004:1) says that in most cases, literature is referred to as the entirety of written expression, with the restriction that not every written document can be categorized as literature in the more exact sense of the word. The definitions, therefore, usually include additional adjectives suchas aesthetic or artistic to distinguish literary works from texts such as newspapers, scientific textbooks, magazines, legal documents, brochures, and so on. Literature then, can be said as a creative writing by an author with aesthetic values which makesliterature regarded as an art. Literature as a writing form differentiates its form from other art products, and its aesthetic or artistic values make it different from other writings.

Wellek and Warren (1963:22) also state that the term literature seems

best if we limit it to the art of literature, that is, to imaginative literature. Literature is

also produced by imagination of the author. Literature is not just a document of

facts, it is not just the collection of real events though it may happen in the

real life. Literature can create its own world as a product of the unlimited imagination.

According Pickering, James H & Hoeper, Jeffrey D that " the creation of literature is a uniquely human activity, born of man's timeless desire to understand, express, and finally share experiences, (1981. 01:307)". from the statement of the expert that literature is the unique human activity that produce the creative thinking in mind in contain of the human's experience. the human can be make literature from the produce of their mind thinking. and human have made a literature since along time ago before we have know about literature.

Literature is often defined as a permanent expression in words of some thought or feeling idea about life and the world. Literary work can construct the world throughout words for the motive that words have power. By the side of statement, it is represented that through that power, it can form an image of particular world, as a new world. Those words have documentary aspects that can break through space and times, illustrate past as well as future (Ratna, 2005:150).

The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a comprehensive collection of poems, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, and essays authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the present.  Evenly divided into two volumes, it is also the first such anthology to be conceived and published for both classroom and online education in the new millennium. 

·        

 By Esther Lombardi

·        

 Classic Literature Expert

Literature is a term used to describe written and sometimes spoken material. Derived from the Latin litteratura meaning "writing formed with letters," literature most commonly refers to works of the creative imagination, including poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and in some instances, song.  

 

Merriam webster sice 1928

• : written works (such as poems, plays, and novels) that are considered to be very good and to have lasting importance

• : books, articles, etc., about a particular subject
• : printed materials (such as booklets, leaflets, and brochures) that provide information about something

  REFERENCES 

http://repository.usu.ac.id/bitstream/123456789/16874/5/Chapter%20I.pdf

http://www.idwrite.com/2015/04/definition-of-literature-according-to.html

http://elib.unikom.ac.id/download.php?id=60443

http://classiclit.about.com/od/literaryterms/g/aa_whatisliter.htm

http://as.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-EHEP003003.html

In his book The Establishment of Modern English Prose (1998), Ian Robinson observes that the term prose is "surprisingly hard to define. . . . We shall return to the sense there may be in the old joke that prose is not verse."

Philosophy Teacher: All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.
M. Jourdain: What? When I say: "Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give me my night-cap," is that prose?
Philosophy Teacher: Yes, sir.
M. Jourdain: Good heavens! For more than 40 years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.
(Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 1671)

"For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty."
(John Cheever, on accepting the National Medal for Literature, 1982)

"Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it."
(Jeremy Bentham, quoted by M. St. J. Packe in The Life of John Stuart Mill, 1954)

"You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."
(Governor Mario Cuomo, New Republic, April 8, 1985)

"[O]ne can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane."
(George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1946)

"Our ideal prose, like our ideal typography, is transparent: if a reader doesn't notice it, if it provides a transparent window to the meaning, then the prose stylist has succeeded. But if your ideal prose is purely transparent, such transparency will be, by definition, hard to describe. You can't hit what you can't see. And what is transparent to you is often opaque to someone else. Such an ideal makes for a difficult pedagogy."
(Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose, 2nd ed. Continuum, 2003)

"Prose is the ordinary form of spoken or written language: it fulfills innumerable functions, and it can attain many different kinds of excellence. A well-argued legal judgment, a lucid scientific paper, a readily grasped set of technical instructions all represent triumphs of prose after their fashion. And quantity tells. Inspired prose may be as rare as great poetry--though I am inclined to doubt even that; but good prose is unquestionably far more common than good poetry. It is something you can come across every day: in a letter, in a newspaper, almost anywhere."
(John Gross, Introduction to The New Oxford Book of English Prose. Oxford Univ. Press, 1998)

REFERENCES

http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/proseterm.htm