Does JavaScript have literal strings?

Short answer: No

Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I don't know what you're getting at, but one way to get around the problem of escaping (etc) is use a trick that John Resig seems to like a lot. You include <script> blocks in a page, but give them a "type" like "text/plain" to make sure that the browser doesn't hand them over to Javascript. Then use the text of the script block for whatever you like.

<script id='a_string' type='text/plain'>
  Here is some stuff.
  There might be some \escape sequences in it.
</script>

Then you can grab that with $('#a_string').text() (or with getElementById if you're not using jQuery or something like that).

edit: Here's John Resig's explanation about why dropping stuff into script blocks like that is a good idea:

Quick tip: Embedding scripts in your page that have a unknown content-type (such is the case here - the browser doesn't know how to execute a text/html script) are simply ignored by the browser - and by search engines and screenreaders. It's a perfect cloaking device for sneaking templates into your page. I like to use this technique for quick-and-dirty cases where I just need a little template or two on the page and want something light and fast.

Taken from this page: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/

Literal strings are available through the use of ES6 language features. Node.js v4.x now supports these and around 90% of the other ES6 additions as well.

Template literals (Template strings)

In JavaScript, string literals are known as template strings. And the syntax is pretty straightforward.

This will work as long as you don't throw a \x into the string!

var str = String.raw`\whatever\this\is`;

console.log(str);

Just escape the escapes

var myCrazyString = "\\yes\\we\\have\\no\\bananas"