Literary Terms: Literary Genres - Advanced

If you want to keep your stories straight, study this list of literary genres. You'll learn all about different types of fiction, poetry, and drama, from folklore to memoir to epic.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. apocalyptic
    prophetic of devastation or ultimate doom
  2. autobiography
    a book or account of your own life
  3. ballad
    a narrative song with a recurrent refrain
  4. bildungsroman
    a novel that focuses on the growth of the main character
  5. biography
    an account of the series of events making up a person's life
  6. comedy
    light and humorous drama with a happy ending
  7. drama
    a work intended for performance by actors on a stage
  8. dystopia
    a work set in an imaginary place where life is extremely bad
  9. elegy
    a mournful poem; a lament for the dead
  10. epic
    a long narrative poem telling of a hero's deeds
  11. epistolary
    written in the form of letters or correspondence
  12. epitaph
    a summary statement of commemoration for a dead person
  13. essay
    an analytic or interpretive literary composition
  14. fable
    a short moral story
  15. fantasy
    fiction with a large amount of imagination in it
  16. farce
    a comedy characterized by broad satire
  17. folklore
    the unwritten stories and proverbs and songs of a culture
  18. folktale
    a traditional story or legend circulated by word of mouth
  19. gothic
    characterized by gloom and mystery and the grotesque
  20. haiku
    an epigrammatic Japanese verse form of three short lines
  21. homily
    a sermon on a moral or religious topic
  22. lyric
    a short poem of songlike quality
  23. melodrama
    a story with characters behaving in an extreme emotional way
  24. memoir
    an account of the author's personal experiences
  25. mystery
    a story about a crime presented as a novel or play or movie
  26. myth
    a traditional story serving to explain a world view
  27. novel
    an extended fictional work in prose
  28. novella
    a short novel
  29. ode
    a lyric poem with complex stanza forms
  30. parable
    a short moral story
  31. parody
    a composition that imitates or misrepresents a style
  32. pastoral
    a literary work idealizing the rural life
  33. picaresque
    (of fiction) involving clever rogues or adventurers
  34. poetry
    literature in metrical form
  35. romance
    a story dealing with love
  36. satire
    witty language used to convey insults or scorn
  37. sonnet
    a verse form of 14 lines with a fixed rhyme scheme
  38. thriller
    a suspenseful story, play, or movie
  39. tragedy
    drama exciting terror or pity
  40. utopia
    a work of fiction describing an ideal state
Created on Wed Dec 02 12:16:02 EST 2020 (updated Wed Dec 02 12:33:50 EST 2020)

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