Literary genre

The literary genres are the different groups or categories into which we can classify literary works based on their content and structure. Rhetoric has classified them into five important groups: narrative, lyrical, poetic, dramatic, and didactic genre, the most innovative being the didactic and narrative categories. In the narrative the figure of the narrator is present, who can be internal to the story or external to it. These style denominations are a point of reference for the analysis of the literature. The literary genre is composed of different groups that allow classifying literary texts depending on their specific content. They are formal and thematic structuring models that allow establishing a scheme prior to the creation of a work. The classification of literary works into genres and subgenres follows semantic, syntactic, phonological, discursive, formal, contextual, situational and related criteria. In history there have been several classifications of literary genres, so it is not possible to determine a categorization of all the works following a common criterion.

Classification of Literary Genres

Genres

The classification of literary genres begins with Aristotle, who in his work La Poetics distinguishes the following:

• The narrating genre: At its origin it was a literary genre in which the author presented legendary facts, usually making them pass by true or based on the truth. His usual form of expression is narration, although description and dialogue can also be mixed. In some cases, the narrative is not written, but orally told by the rapsodas.

• The singing genre: It is a literary genre in which the author conveys feelings, emotions or feelings regarding a person or object of inspiration. The usual expression of the lyric genre is the poem. Although lyric texts often use the verse as a form of expression, there are also lyric texts in prose (poetic prose).

• Actuator gender: Mainly linked to the theatre, it is the one that represents some episode or conflict of human life through the dialogue of the characters. Its most characteristic features are the use of dialogue and the narrator's figure does not appear. This genre is intended to be represented, thus covering everything written for the theatre. The end of a work of the dramatic genre, although it can be read, is its representation on a stage before spectators. That task is carried out by the actors, who incarnate the characters and are led by a director.

• Teaching gender aims at teaching or disseminating ideas expressed in an artistic way, with an elaborate language and resources of philosophy. The chess book of Alfonso X el Sabio, mystical writings, and essays such as Miguel de Unamuno are categorized in this genre.

• The beautiful genre o poetics is understood as poetic the "art of compose verses and works in verse", as well as the study that an author makes about his own work.

Each of these genres would be defined by a mode of expression and its own style that had to be adapted to its aesthetic purpose. Any of them can be expressed in verse or prose.

Subgenres

The four great literary genres under the modern vision (narrative, lyrical, dramatic and didactic) each comprise a variety of subgenres, in some texts defined as «literary forms». Fundamentally they are: Big

Narrative subgenres

• Epic: referring to the exploits of one or more heroes and the real or imaginary struggles in which they have participated. His traditional form of expression has been the verse, in the form of epic poems whose ultimate purpose is the exaltation or enlargement of a people.

• The epic: in an old age of mythical character. His characters are gods, demigods and mythological beings. Among the most important epopeyas are the Iliad and the Odyssey.

• The singing of gesta: counts feats made by the gentlemen of the Middle Ages. They are usually heroic legends of a people, like the Song of the Nibelungos, the Singing from my Cid or Roland Chanson.

• The story: a short story based or not on real facts, inspired or not in previous writings or legends, whose plot is dominated by a small group of characters, and which has a relatively simple argument.

• The novel: a literary work in prose in which a fined action is narrated in whole or in part, and whose purpose is to cause aesthetic pleasure to readers with the description or painting of interesting events or lances, as well as of characters, passions and customs. It is the most practiced literary form at present. There is a great diversity of types or genres of novels. According to the theorist Michael Bajtín, the novel is the genre that represents a greater degree of complexity in the construction of his ideas.

• The fable: short literary composition in which the characters are almost always animals that present human characteristics such as speaking. These stories include an instructive teaching or morale that usually appears at the end of the text, so they are considered to have a mixed narrative and didactic character.

Old lyrical subgenres

• The lyric coral of classical Greece (Oda, hymn, anacreontics, epitalamius, pean).
• Song: admirative poem that expresses an emotion or feeling.
• Hymn: very exalted song (religious, national or patriotic).
• Oda: Reflective and meditative poem that tends to exalt and praise a subject or matter.
• Choice: meditative and melancholic poem.
• Egloga: Bucolic poem.
• Sátira: Moorish poem.
• Epigram: poem mordaz, concise, usually written in verse.
• Romance: lyric poem characteristic of the composite oral tradition using the homonymous metric combination.

Modern and contemporary lyrical subgenres

• Soneto: Poetic composition formed by fourteen verses of major art, usually endecasylabos, and consonant rhyme, which are distributed in two quartets and two stews. "The Spanish sonnet is of Italian influence and begins to rehearse in the 15th century."
• Madrigal: Short lyric Poem, generally loving, which expresses an praiseworthy compliment to a lady, and in which verses of 11 and 7 syllables are combined. Renaissance musical composition written for various voices, with or without accompaniment of instruments, of profane theme, generally loving, and whose lyrics used to be a cult poem.

Dramatic subgenres

They are the different varieties of drama or play, made up of dialogues between characters and with a certain order.

• Tragedy: a work in which the leading characters are confronted mysteriously, invincible and inevitable against destiny or gods.
• Comedy: a work that presents a majority of scenes and humorous or festive situations.
• The melodrama: in which the sentimental, pathetic, or tearful aspects of the work are exaggerated with the intention to provoke emotions in the public.
• The tragicomedia: in which the tragic and comic elements are mixed, although there is also room for sarcasm and parody.
• The farce: whose structure and plot are based on situations in which the characters behave extravagantly and strangely, although usually maintaining a share of credibility.

Didactic subgenres

Currently, literary forms are also considered to be those that are didactic, such as:

• The rehearsal.
• The biography.
• The chronicle.
• The written memory.
• The prayer: forensic, festive, political discourse; pregon, herring, exaltation...
• Epistle or letter.
• The scientific or philosophical treaty.
• The fable, mixed between narrative and didactic.
• The didactic novel.
• The dialogue.
• The extensive didactic poem, like Phainomena of the Greek Arato, or Rerum natura of Lucrecio, the Geórgicas of Virgil and the Astronomicon Manilio, all Romans, or Rehearsal on man of English Alexander Pope.
• Aphorism.

Poetic subgenres

• Japanese poetry, haiku.
• Poetry troubling. Twelve stil nuovo (sweet new style).
• Castilian versification. Stay away, sonnets, etc.
• English poetry of the centuries XX. and XXI.
• Contemporary poetry. Free versa, metapoesy, biopoesy, visual poetry, transmodernist poetry, poetry of consciousness.
• Historical poetics.
• The Renaissance and the Spanish Golden Age.
• Poetics in semiotic, music and philosophy.

Contemporary literary genres

Currently it is difficult to talk about genre, especially with respect to the production of works after modernism, because there are no formal characteristics to determine which works belong to a certain genre. For example, the novel, after a certain evolution at the end of the XIX century that culminates in Gustave Flaubert, has become the 20th century and early 21st century in the literary form par excellence, which welcomes more different writing proposals. The term novel now serves as a name for a corpus of works of a certain length, in which various discourses can be accommodated and in which neither the unity nor the coherence in action established by the Aristotelian canon is necessary. Among these works, those that make use of polyphony are frequent, presenting different narrative voices, and those that deal with different themes or offer different plot blocks in the same work. Of course, there is no longer a common formal element that groups them.

The novel as a literary genre

The treatment of the novel as a written genre only came after 1934, when Mikhail Bakhtin differentiated the novel from fictional prose and lyric poetry. The antecedents of this discussion of the previous critics is that they had not found in the novel the same stylistic form of poetry and, therefore, it had been denied any artistic significance, only to treat it as a document. Starting in the twenties, he had considered studying novel prose and defining it by its specificity. According to Bakhtin, it was a mistake of the critics of the twenties to trace the analyzes of poetic genres to be a monostylistic study. Rejecting stylistics in this way the status of study of the novel for only being reduced to the individual skills and the artist, and leaving aside the evidence of the speech of the cities, of the social records, of the generations and the times (Francisco Abad, "Bakhtin before the literary language").