Reading: Literature - Literary Genres - Middle School

If you want to keep your stories straight, study this list of literary genres. You'll learn about comedy and tragedy, novels and short stories, myths and fables, and more.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. autobiography
    a book or account of your own life
  2. ballad
    a narrative song with a recurrent refrain
  3. biography
    an account of the series of events making up a person's life
  4. comedy
    light and humorous drama with a happy ending
  5. detective novel
    novel in which the reader is challenged to solve a puzzle before the detective explains it at the end
  6. drama
    a work intended for performance by actors on a stage
  7. dystopia
    a work set in an imaginary place where life is extremely bad
  8. epic
    a long narrative poem telling of a hero's deeds
  9. essay
    an analytic or interpretive literary composition
  10. fable
    a short moral story
  11. fairy tale
    a children's story involving fantastical beings or elements
  12. fantasy
    fiction with a large amount of imagination in it
  13. folklore
    the unwritten stories and proverbs and songs of a culture
  14. haiku
    an epigrammatic Japanese verse form of three short lines
  15. memoir
    an account of the author's personal experiences
  16. mystery
    a story about a crime presented as a novel or play or movie
  17. myth
    a traditional story serving to explain a world view
  18. novel
    an extended fictional work in prose
  19. novella
    a short novel
  20. ode
    a lyric poem with complex stanza forms
  21. poetry
    literature in metrical form
  22. science fiction
    genre involving the imagined impact of technology on society
  23. short story
    a brief but fully developed prose narrative
  24. sonnet
    a verse form of 14 lines with a fixed rhyme scheme
  25. tall tale
    an improbable (unusual or incredible or fanciful) story
  26. thriller
    a suspenseful story, play, or movie
  27. tragedy
    drama exciting terror or pity
  28. utopia
    a work of fiction describing an ideal state
Created on Fri Jan 13 14:36:44 EST 2017 (updated Wed Mar 29 15:36:17 EDT 2017)

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