Paper Details

Name: Gitanjali Singh
Country: India

Year: 2018
Volume: Volume-5, Issue-1 & 2 (Combined Issue)
Page Number: 18-30

A genre (from French "kind" or "sort", from Latin: genus) is a loose set of criteria for a category of composition; the term is often used to categorize literature and speech, but is also used for any other form of art or utterance. Genres are vague categories with no fixed boundaries, they are formed by sets of conventions, and many works cross into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Genres are often divided into subgenres. Literature, for example, is divided into three basic kinds of literature, which are the classic genres of Ancient Greece: poetry, drama, and prose. Poetry may then be subdivided into epic, lyric, and dramatic. Subdivisions of drama includes foremost comedy and tragedy, while e.g. comedy itself has subgenres, including farce, comedy of manners, burlesque, satire, and so on. However, any of these terms would be called "genre", and its possible more general terms implied. The term novel is now applied to an extended narrative or extended works of fiction written in prose. It is distinguished from the long narratives in verse of Chaucer, Spenser and Milton which, beginning with the 18th Century, the novel has increasingly supplanted e.g. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Jane Austen’s Emma, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Franz Kafka’s The Trial etc. Richardson’s Clarissa is an epistolatory novel where the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters. The actual term novel had a variety of meanings and implications at different stages. From roughly 16th to 18th Century, the term tended to derive its meaning from the Italian novella and the Spanish novella and the term denoted short stories or tales of the kind one finds in Boccaccio’s Decameron etc.