It is difficult to define literature considering that it could have a lot of different meanings for each reader. Literature can have several meanings:
• The one intended by the author
• The meaning created by and contained in the text
• The one created by the reader

A reader can make up his own idea but not in a free way. He must support his idea by references to the text.
An author could give his own meaning at a text but we, as readers, can only know that by reading other works of the same author or studying every single particular of the sort of meanings that seem to be common in the author's texts and by knowing what the culture and symbols of the time were. To read and understand and appreciate a text which is not contemporary, we have to think like we were in that time because are values and knowledge are not the same as the ones of the readers of that time.

The text is made up of the grammar, the language, the uses of image and so on. A text is only ink stain on a paper, we could say, so the argument that the meaning is ‘in' the text is not a convincing one.
The meaning exists when it means something to someone and art is composed in order to arouse emotions and responses in the reader.

 There is no other reason for it to exist or for it to have patterns or aesthetic qualities or for it to user symbols or have cultural codes if there's no reader to give it a meaning. (cit.)

For me, literature is an art expressed by words that let you fly in a sky full of meaning and colors. When you read a literary text you let yourself be transported to unknown places where you can imagine everything that is told and, if you let yourself go, even see it, feel it and touch it...