Types and GENRES of literature

Critics have invented a variety of systems for treating literature as a collection of genres. Often these genres are artificial, invented after the fact with the aim of making literature less sprawling, more tidy. Theories of literature must be based upon direct experience of the living texts and so be flexible enough to contain their individuality and variety. Perhaps the best approach is historical, or genetic. What actually happened, and in what way did literature evolve up to the present day?

There is a surprising variety of oral literature among surviving preliterate peoples, and, as the written word emerges in history, the indications are that the important literary genres all existed at the beginning of civilized societies: heroic epic; songs in praise of priests and kings; stories of mystery and the supernatural; love lyrics; personal songs (the result of intense meditation); love stories; tales of adventure and heroism (of common peoples, as distinct from the heroic epics of the upper classes); satire (which was dreaded by barbaric chieftains); satirical combats (in which two poets or two personifications abused one another and praised themselves); ballads and folktales of tragedy and murder; folk stories, such as the tale of the clever boy who performs impossible tasks, outwits all his adversaries, and usually wins the hand of the king’s daughter; animal fables like those attributed to Aesop (the special delight of Black Africa and Indian America); riddles, proverbs, and philosophical observations; hymns, incantations, and mysterious songs of priests; and finally actual mythology — stories of the origin of the world and the human race, of the great dead, and of the gods and demigods..

The type and genres of lit-re.

Readers of literature don't just read literature. That statement has a two-part significance. First, not all literature is similar; second, reading one genre is not the same as reading another. We don't read poetry in the way that we read prose fiction. In fact, we don't read one type of poem, an ode, in the same way that we read another type, a sonnet. Different genres--that is, different types of literature such as epics, lyrics, sonnet, elegies, comedies, tragedies, novels, short stories, vignettes, essays, non-fiction prose, autobiographies--demand different ways of reading. We read for the literary techniques or devices specific to the genre of the work we read (or, perhaps more accurately, we read presupposing that we will encounter and experience and base our discernment of meaning upon the devices employed in that genre). To a certain extent, genre and technique go hand-in-hand; nevertheless, many techniques are common to many forms of language use and can be found in many genres. Remember that a term is a concept is a tool for understanding.

Types

While the number of genres and their subdivisions has proliferated since classical times, the division of the literary domain into three major genres (by Plato, Aristotle, and, later, Horace), is still useful. These are lyric, drama, and epic, and they are distinguished by "manner of imitation," that is, by how the characters and the action are presented. The chart briefly summarizes the main differences in the way action and characters are presented in the lyric, drama, and the epic.

The lyric includes all the shorter forms of poetry, e.g., song, ode, ballad, elegy, sonnet. Up to the nineteenth century, the short lyric poem was considered the least important of the genres, but with the Romantic movement the prestige of the lyric increased considerably. The relative brevity of the lyric leads to an emphasis upon tight formal construction and concentrated unity. Typically, the subject matter is expressive, whether of personal emotions, such as love or grief, or of public emotions, such as patriotism or reverence or celebration. Lyric: The poet writes the poem as his or her own experience; often the poet uses first person ("I"); however, this speaker is not necessarily the poet but may be a fictional character or persona.

Drama: The characters are obviously separate from the writer; in fact, they generally seem to have lives of their own and their speech reflects their individual personalities. The writer is present, of course, in stage directions (which the audience isn't aware of during a performance), and occasionally a character acts as a mouthpiece for the writer.

The epic, in the classical formulation of the three genres, referred exclusively to the "poetic epic." It was of course in verse, rather lengthy (24 books in Homer, 12 books in Virgil), and tended to be episodic. It dealt in elevated language with heroic figures (human heroes and deities) whose exploits affected whole civilizations or even, by implication, the whole of mankind. Its lengthiness was properly a response to the magnitude of the subject material.

Epic: This long narrative is primarily written in third person. However, the epic poet makes his presence known, sometimes by speaking in first person, as when the muses are appealed to for inspiration (the invocation) or by reporting the direct speech of the characters.

Poetry is language in its most concentrated form. A poet uses the sounds, rhythms, and meanings of words to paint pictures with language. Poetry is often intended to be read on the page, but there are many poems that need to be read out loud to be fully appreciated. Prose We usually think of novels, short stories, or essays when we talk about prose. Prose writers use language to create a mixture of characters, places, and events that construct an entire world on the page, and in the reader's mind. Plays are works of literature that are generally intended to be performed by actors in front of an audience. Dialog and plot are two of the key ingredients in creating a play.

William Shakespeare is regarded by many as one of, if not the, best playwrite in the English Language. He wrote 38 plays, including Comedies, such as The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It ; Histories, such as King Richard the Third and King Henry the Fifth ; Tragedies, such as Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet ; and Romances, such as Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Tempest .

Epic. The true heroic epic never evolved far from its preliterate origins, and it arose only in the Heroic Age which preceded a settled civilization. The conditions reflected in, say, the Iliad and Odyssey are much the same as those of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the German Nibelungenlied, or the Irish stories of Cuchulainn. The literary epic is another matter altogether. Virgil’s Aeneid, for instance, or Milton’s Paradise Lost are products of highly sophisticated literary cultures. Many long poems sometimes classified as epic literature are no such thing — Dante’s La divina Commedia, for example, is a long theological, philosophical, political, moral, and mystical poem. Dante considered it to be a kind of drama which obeyed the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. Goethe’s Faust is in dramatic form and is sometimes even staged — but it is really a philosophical poetic novel. Modern critics have described long poems such as T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantos as “philosophical epics.” There is nothing epic about them; they are reveries, more or less philosophical.

Lyric poetry. Lyric poetry never gets far from its origins, except that some of its finest examples — Medieval Latin, Provenзal, Middle High German, Middle French, Renaissance — which today are only read, were actually written to be sung. In the twentieth century, however, popular songs of great literary merit have become increasingly common — for example, the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in German, of Georges Brassens and Anne Sylvestre in French, and of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell. It is interesting to note that, in periods when the culture values artificiality, the lyric becomes stereotyped. Then, after a while, the poets revolt and, usually turning to folk origins, restore to lyric poetry at least the appearance of naturalness and spontaneity.

Satire. The forms of satire are as manifold as those of literature itself — from those of the mock epic to the biting epigram. A great many social and political novels of today would have been regarded as satire by the ancients. Many of the great works of all time are satires, but in each case they have risen far above their immediate satirical objectives. The sixteenth-century medieval satire on civilization, the Gargantua and Pantagruel of Rabelais, grew under the hand of its author into a great archetypal myth of the lust for life. Cervantes’s Don Quixote, often called the greatest work of prose fiction in the West, is superficially a satire of the sentimental romance of knightly adventure. But, again, it is an archetypal myth, telling the adventures of the soul of man — of the individual — in the long struggle with what is called the human condition. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu has sometimes been considered by obtuse critics as no more than a satire on the sexual promiscuity of the Heian court. In fact, it is a profoundly philosophical, religious, and mystical novel.

Prose fiction. Extended prose fiction is the latest of the literary forms to develop. We have romances from classical Greek times that are as long as short novels; but they are really tales of adventure — vastly extended anecdotes. The first prose fiction of any psychological depth is the Satyricon, attributed to Petronius Arbiter (died AD 65/66). Though it survives only in fragments, supposedly one-eleventh of the whole, even these would indicate that it is one of the greatest picaresque novels, composed of loosely connected episodes of robust and often erotic adventure. The other great surviving fiction of classical times is the Metamorphoses (known as The Golden Ass) by Apuleius (2nd century AD). In addition to being a picaresque adventure story, it is a criticism of Roman society, a celebration of the religion of Isis, and an allegory of the progress of the soul. It contains the justly celebrated story of Cupid and Psyche, a myth retold with psychological subtlety. Style has much to do with the value and hence the survival of these two works. They are written in prose of extraordinary beauty, although it is by no means of “classical” purity. The prose romances of the Middle Ages are closely related to earlier heroic literature. Some, like Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Le Morte d’Arthur, are retellings of heroic legend in terms of the romantic chivalry of the early Renaissance, a combination of barbaric, medieval, and Renaissance sensibility which, in the tales of Tristram and Isolt and Lancelot and Guinevere, produced something not unlike modern novels of tragic love.

The Western novel is a product of modern civilization, although in the Far East novels began a separate development as early as the tenth century. Extended prose works of complex interpersonal relations and motivations begin in seventeenth-century France with The Princess of Clиves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette. Eighteenth-century France produced an immense number of novels dealing with love analysis but none to compare with Madame de Lafayette’s until Pierre Choderlos de Laclos wrote Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). This was, in form, an exchange of letters between two corrupters of youth; but, in intent, it was a savage satire of the ancient regime and a heart-rending psychological study. The English novel of the eighteenth century was less subtle, more robust — vulgar in the best sense — and is exemplified by Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The nineteenth century was the golden age of the novel. It became ever more profound, complex, and subtle (or, on the other hand, more popular, eventful, and sentimental). By the beginning of the twentieth century it had become the most common form of thoughtful reading matter and had replaced, for most educated people, religious, philosophical, and scientific works as a medium for the interpretation of life. By the late 1920s the novel had begun to show signs of decay as a form, and no works have since been produced to compare with the recent past. This may prove to be a temporarily barren period, or else the novel may be losing its energy as a narrative art form and in this sense giving way to the medium of film. Drama. Like lyric poetry, drama has been an exceptionally stable literary form. Given a little leeway, most plays written by the beginning of the twentieth century could be adjusted to the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. Before World War I, however, all traditional art forms, led by painting, began to disintegrate, and new forms evolved to take their place. In drama the most radical innovator was August Strindberg (1849-1912), and from that day to this, drama (forced to compete with the cinema) has become ever more experimental, constantly striving for new methods, materials, and, especially, ways to establish a close relationship with the audience. All this activity has profoundly modified drama as literature. Future developments. a single form may in the future be more and more directed toward the elaboration of entirely new “multimedia” forms, employing the resources of all the established arts. At the same time, writers may prefer to simplify and polish the forms of the past with a rigorous, Neoclassicist discipline. In a worldwide urban civilization, which has taken to itself the styles and discoveries of all cultures past and present, the future of literature is quite impossible to determine.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 3639