The originally very broad and neutral concept of literature was described as a whole "everything recorded in writing" (Meid p. 304). The determination of the essence, ie the definition of literature, depends on what it is supposed to accomplish, what it must fulfill, what it can achieve in the ideal case. The dtv lexicon defines neutrally: In the narrower sense, literature here is what others arrange according to different criteria: " Literature: [lat.] Total of the utterly written utterances, in the narrower sense the entire beautiful-spiritual literature Or subject areas . " Customer Service Video Gero von Wilpert (author and literary scholar, 1933-2009) saw literature in the narrower sense as the totality of the "linguistic works of art", which satisfy particular aesthetic criteria and are in their highest form poetry. However, he did not say what criteria they are. Literature is here all that can become the "object" of literary science. Since the literary sciences are concerned with the analysis of orally handed down testimonies, there is no denying that they are written down.