Concept

History of literature

Overview

historical development of writings

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

When mankind first began to attempt to express their ideas by writing, every character represented a whole word. But the number of words being almost infinite, the memory found itself quite loaded and oppressed by the multitude of characters which it was obliged to retain.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
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1); and the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce, which took place about the same period, would furnish increased facilities for obtaining the requisite papyrus to write upon. A reading class, when once formed, would doubtless slowly increase, and the number of manuscripts along with it; so that before the time of Solôn, fifty years afterwards, both readers and manuscripts, though still comparatively few, might have…
Homer, The Iliad
Close in meaning to History of literature; the term itself is not named.
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After about a hundred, or at most two hundred years if we exclude Homer, the genius of Hellas had ceased to flower or blossom. The dreary waste which follows, beginning with the Alexandrian writers and even before them in the platitudes of Isocrates and his school, spreads over much more than a thousand years. And from this decline the Greek language and literature, unlike the Latin, which has come to life in new…
Plato, Phaedrus
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Philosophers who discussed History of literature

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William Shakespeare

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