Literary Terms: Literary Genres - Introductory

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. drama
    a work intended for performance by actors on a stage
  6. dystopia
    a work set in an imaginary place where life is extremely bad
  7. epic
    a long narrative poem telling of a hero's deeds
  8. essay
    an analytic or interpretive literary composition
  9. fable
    a short moral story
  10. fantasy
    fiction with a large amount of imagination in it
  11. folklore
    the unwritten stories and proverbs and songs of a culture
  12. folktale
    a traditional story or legend circulated by word of mouth
  13. haiku
    an epigrammatic Japanese verse form of three short lines
  14. memoir
    an account of the author's personal experiences
  15. mystery
    a story about a crime presented as a novel or play or movie
  16. myth
    a traditional story serving to explain a world view
  17. novel
    an extended fictional work in prose
  18. novella
    a short novel
  19. ode
    a lyric poem with complex stanza forms
  20. poetry
    literature in metrical form
  21. sonnet
    a verse form of 14 lines with a fixed rhyme scheme
  22. thriller
    a suspenseful story, play, or movie
  23. tragedy
    drama exciting terror or pity
  24. utopia
    a work of fiction describing an ideal state
Created on Wed Dec 02 12:15:29 EST 2020 (updated Wed Dec 02 12:30:11 EST 2020)

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