Literary Genres Quiz

Overview of Literary Genres

• A literary genre is a category of literature that can be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or length.
• Genres can be in the form of prose or poetry, and they are defined by the general cultural movement of the historical period in which they were composed.
• The concept of genre began in the works of Aristotle, who applied biological concepts to the classification of literary genres.
• After the time of Aristotle, literary criticism continued to develop, and the Romantic period saw the emergence of a new genre, the 'imaginative' genre.
• In 1957, Canadian scholar Northrop Frye published "Anatomy of Criticism," in which he proposes a system of genres and a set of rules to describe the constraints of each genre.
• Modern genre theory often sought to dispense with the conventions that have marked the categorization of genres for centuries.
• Genre categorizes literary works based on specific shared conventions such as style, mood, length, and organizational features.
• Western literature is typically subdivided into the classic three forms of Ancient Greece, poetry, drama, and prose, which can be further divided into subgenres.
• Often, the criteria used to divide up works into genres are not consistent and can be subject to debate, change, and challenge by both authors and critics.
• Common genres in Western literature include fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, comedy, tragedy, semi-fiction, and satire.
• There are other ways of categorizing books that are not usually considered "genre," such as age categories and classification by format.
• The distinctions between genres and categories are flexible and loosely defined, and even the rules designating genres change over time and are fairly unstable.