A literary fragment is a work of literature that only exists partially due to loss or damage, such as Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. It can also refer to completed works that have not remained intact over time, like papyrus tablets. The term can also refer to sections of The Canterbury Tales, which remain unread and their original order is unknown.
A literary fragment is a literary work that remains or exists only as part of the whole that originally existed or was planned. This may refer to a work that was never completed, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. The term can also be used to refer to works of literature that have probably been completed, but which only partially remain due to the loss of the original versions or damage to the remaining copies. A literary fragment may also refer to one of the sections of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
A common type of literary fragment is a piece of writing that has begun but is not finished, due to lack of inspiration or the death of the author. Perhaps the most famous literary fragment of this kind is the poem Kubla Khan, written by the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge has stated that the inspiration for the poem came to him during a dream that was affected by opium he had used for a medical problem. When he awoke from the dream, he began writing the poem but only completed 30 lines before being interrupted by someone he only described as “a person from Porlock” and could not remember the rest of the poem as he had dreamed it. .
A literary fragment can also be a literary work that has been completed but does not remain in that state. It can refer to works written on papyrus tablets or scrolls that have not remained intact over time. Such a work is often found only as a literary fragment, as pieces of the original text remain but cannot be read or recovered as a complete work. These types of snippets have also extended into other art forms, such as old films that exist but are missing reels or have had the only existing print deteriorate over time.
The term “literary fragment” can also be used to refer to one of the sections of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. This work exists as ten fragments, which are often numbered using Roman numerals or alphabetized as AI. These fragments remain unread by scholars and lovers of literature, but their correct order is not fully known. Some of them refer to events in other fragments, which has allowed some certainty in the ordering of some fragments, but most of them contain no such references and the original order intended by Chaucer has been lost.
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