Literature
There is a greater number of bookshops per capita in Melbourne than any other Australian city. In August 2008, Melbourne was designated as a City of Literature in UNESCO's Creative Cities Network program, recognising the role literature plays in the cultural life of Melbourne through its festivals, libraries, bookshops, publishing and other literary events and activities.
The Melbourne Writers Festival plays a significant role in establishing Melbourne's credence as a city which promotes and respects literature.
The Wheeler Centre a literary and publishing centre housed in the southern wing of the State Library of Victoria opened in February 2010.
Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), set in boom time Melbourne, remains a classic of crime fiction. Hume gathered material for the novel during sojourns in Melbourne's slums and Little Bourke Street.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Melbourne
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)