Literature & Magic: The Marriage of Word and Image

Is literature the same as writing? The historian would say “yes.” Out of the song cycles and ritual performances of an oral culture, the discriminated genres of poetry and prose—epic, dramatic, lyric—accompanied the development of a literate culture. With the growth of print out of literate culture in the last millennium came the literature we know: verbal arts and entertainments, the novel chief among them, bound in printed books and marked for sale.