Talking about Literary Genres

Talking about Literary Genres

BLOG SESSION

November 2nd, 2017

Good Morning Novelists!  Welcome back to our Blog Session about Literary Genres.  We'll be discussing genres to help you to pick out which genre your Novel fits into as you write your Novel this month during National Novel Writing Month.

A Genre is a label that characterizes what your Reader can expect with regard to your Novel.  Readers pick certain genres that suit their taste when it comes to choosing a Novel to read.  Whenever you choose a certain genre, it gives you an idea of what you can expect in a work of literature or nonfiction.  The major forms of literature can be written in various genres.  Genre is a category characterized by similarities in style or subject matter.

Let's start with the classic major genres of literature . . .

Comedy:  Refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, and stand-up-comedy.  The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece.  Comedy derives from the Greek term (κωμῳδία, kōmōidía).  The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict.  Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old".  A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that post obstacles to his or her hopes.  In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his or her lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.

Other forms of comedy include screwball comedy, which derives its humor largely from bizarre, surprising (and improbable) situations or characters, and black comedy, which is characterized by a form of humor that includes darker aspects of human behavior or human nature.  Similarly scatological humor, sexual humor, and race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comic ways.

A comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society (usually upper class society) and uses humor to parody or satirize the behaviour and mannerisms of its members.  Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love.  

Drama:  Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance.

To give you a broader overview, when used to define a specific genre or type of film or television program, drama is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular sub-genre, such as "political drama", "courtroom drama", "historical drama", "domestic drama", or "comedy drama".  These terms tend to indicate a particular setting or subject matter, or else they qualify the otherwise serious tone of a drama with elements that encourage a broader range of moods.

All forms of cinema or television that involve fictional stories are forms of drama in the broader sense if their storytelling is achieved by means of actors who represent (mimesis) characters.  In this broader sense, drama is a mode distinct from novels, short stories, and narrative poetry or songs.  In the modern era before the birth of cinema or television, "drama" came to be used within the theatre as a generic term to describe a type of play that was neither a comedy nor a tragedy.  It is this narrower sense that the film and television industries, along with film studies, adopted.

"Radio drama" has been used in both senses--originally transmitted in a live performance, it has also been used to describe the more high-brow and serious end of the dramatic output of radio.

There is a range of descriptions for types of drama in film and television that we will cover in a later Session.  As there are many Writers who specifically write for Film and Television.

Horror Fiction:  Horror is a genre of fiction which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten, scare, disgust, or startle its readers or viewers (in the case of film and/or television) by inducing feelings of horror and terror.

Literary historian J. A. Cuddon has defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length...which shocks or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing".  It creates an eerie and frightening atmosphere.  Horror is frequently supernatural, though it can be non-supernatural.  Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.

For Our Afternoon Blog Session:

More on classic major genres...

Literary Realism

Romance

Satire

Tragedy

Tragicomedy

Fantasy

Mythology

F R I E N D S

Until Our Next Blog Session ~

Keep your Novel on your mind

Peace, Love & Light

By René Allen

©Copyright - René Allen - 2014-2017 - All Rights Reserved