Extant literature refers to texts that have survived from the past to the present time. Extant literature can be divided into extant original manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

s, copies of original manuscripts, quotations and paraphrases of passages of non-extant texts contained in other works, translations of non-extant texts into other languages, or, more recently, photocopies or digital copies of texts.