section_path: Literary arts
section_name: Literary arts
paragraph_text: Literary arts
  
  Literature (also known as literary arts or language arts) is literally "acquaintance with letters", as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary. The noun "literature" comes from the Latin word littera, meaning "an individual written character (letter)." The term has generally come to identify a collection of writings, which in Western culture are mainly prose (both fiction and non-fiction), drama, and poetry. In much, if not all, of the world, artistic linguistic expression can be oral as well and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and folktales. Comics, the combination of drawings or other visual arts with narrating literature, are called the "ninth art" (le neuvième art) in Francophone scholarship.