Literary Genre - Genres

Genres

For more details on this topic, see List of literary genres.

Genres are often divided into sub-genres. Literature, for instance, is divided into three basic kinds of literature, the classic genres of the Ancient Greece, poetry, drama, and prose. Poetry may then be subdivided into epic, lyric, and dramatic. Subdivisions of drama include foremost comedy and tragedy, while e.g. comedy itself has sub-genres, including farce, comedy of manners, burlesque, and satire.

Dramatic poetry for instance, might include comedy, tragedy, melodrama, and mixtures like tragicomedy. This parsing into sub-genres can continue: comedy has its own sub-genres, including, for example, comedy of manners, sentimental comedy, burlesque comedy, and satirical comedy. Also the mixtures, such as tragicomedy, have sub-genres, for example, hardboiled fiction characterized by the tragicomic cynical narrator's self-talk.

Nonfiction can cross many genres but is typically expressed in essays, memoir, and other forms that may or may not be narrative but share the characteristics of being fact-based, artistically-rendered prose.

Often, the criteria used to divide up works into genres are not consistent, and may change constantly, and be subject of argument, change and challenge by both authors and critics. However, even a very loose term like fiction ("literature created from the imagination, not presented as fact, though it may be based on a true story or situation") is not universally applied to all fictitious literature, but instead is typically restricted to the use for novel, short story, and novella, but not fables, and is also usually a prose text. Types of fiction genres are science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, realistic fiction and mysteries.

Semi-fiction spans stories that include a substantial amount of non-fiction. It may be the retelling of a true story with only the names changed. The other way around, semi-fiction may also involve fictional events with a semi-fictional character, such as Jerry Seinfeld.

Genres may easily be confused with literary techniques, but, though only loosely defined, they are not the same; examples are parody, frame story, constrained writing, stream of consciousness.