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Since the 18th century, the definition of the concept "literature" has become a problematic and a controversial issue among various literary schools. What is literature? What are the qualities that distinguish a literary text from a non-literary one? Does literature have any particular function in society? These are some crucial questions whose answers were supposed to limit and define the scope of "literature". However, various literary and critical schools have advanced different and contradictory responses to these same questions, which have consequently led to a failure in producing an authoritatively established definition of "literature".
This failure can be ascribed to many reasons, but because the length of the paper doesn't allow to tackle all of them, the forthcoming paragraphs will be devoted to discuss only two main reasons. The first reason is the difficulty to distinguish between "fact" and "fiction" in some works which, as it will be clarified in the few coming......

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Approximate Word Count: 1779
Approximate Pages: 8 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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