When we write an essay or a scientific paper, we often say that it is possible to “find something in the literature”… But shouldn’t it be “in literature” instead, since “literature” is uncountable?
The answer is: Whether literature is countable or not depends on the context. It is uncountable when we speak about literature as a whole or about the concept of literature, as in the following quotation by Tom Baker:
It’s funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.
When you use “literature” in the sense of a specific collections of books, papers, etc., related to a given subject, it is countable and you should say “the literature”. For example, a physicist could write:
We can find many applications of quantum entanglement in the literature.
It is more natural to use “the literature” here because the implied meaning is “the technical literature related to the subject”. We probably wouldn’t be able to find many applications of quantum entanglement in the concept of literature itself or in the whole body of all existing literature.
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