Literary Fragment

A literary fragment is a piece of text that may be part of a larger work, or that employs a fragmentary form characterised by physical features such as short paragraphs or sentences separated by white space, and by thematic features such as discontinuity, ambivalence, ambiguity or lack of a traditional narrative structure. The cited article says that while literary fragments are difficult to classify, a number of critics agree on a basic taxonomy of two types: those whose authors intentionally use fragmentation as a form, and those that are fragmented because they are incomplete or because parts have been lost over time. As a form it has been employed during the Romantic, Modernist, Postmodern and Contemporary literary periods. Philosophical works the atlas records as aphorisms or fragments are grouped under this entry together with Aphorism.