What Is Literature? What Is Literature? What Is Literature? (), also published as "Literature and Existentialism",) is an essay by French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Gallimard in 1948. Initially published in freestanding essays across French literary journals "Les Temps modernes", "Situations I" and "Situations II", essays "What is Writing?" and "Why Write?" were translated into English and published by the Paris-based literary journal Transition 1948. The English translation by Bernard Frechtman was published in 1950. Sartre attempts to devise an understanding of the effect literature has on those who are subjected to it. In the foreword Sartre addresses his critics
What Is History? observation." Carr attributes the developing complexity with the ideas made popular during the French Revolution, and from that stems the ideas and search of liberty. For his planned second edition, Carr authored a new preface, which was posthumously found among his papers. In this short text, he contrasted what he saw as the optimism of the 1960s, when he originally authored the text, with the pessimism of the 1980s, when he was putting together the second edition. The former, he argued, was marked by the dissolution of the British Empire, the economic recovery of France, Germany and Japan following the