What is literature?

What is literature? Literature to me is many different things. Not only can it be writing or stories but it can even be pictures,poems,or even a bibliography. In school you pick your classes and theres always that literature class. Well to me it is not just that literature class, it is learning to take writing and interpret it in the way you think it should be, or the way you think the writer intended it to be. When i think about literature I think about the different stories i have read or the different pictures I have seen and put input into what I think they could mean to the person who published them. Using your imagination and reading between the lines is sometimes the biggest part of learning literature. Sometimes a writer will not exactly say what they mean so you have to take a deeper look into what they have meant, and that is what makes litereature that much more interesting.