Literary genres

Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English) is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange.

Gunki monogatari (軍記物語), or "war tales," is a category of Japanese literature written primarily in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods that focus on wars and conflicts, especially the civil wars that took place between 1156 and 1568.

An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός aphorismos, "delimitation") is a terse saying, expressing a general truth, principle, or astute observation, and spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form.

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument — but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of an article, a pamphlet, and a short story.

Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized (given human qualities, such as the ability to speak human language) and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a pithy maxim.

Yuefu are Chinese poems composed in a folk song style.

A ghost story may be any piece of fiction, or drama, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them.

A novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story.

Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque (or grottoesque) has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks.

The Nouveau Roman (French pronunciation: ​[nuvo ʁɔmɑ̃], new novel) is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres.

The romance novel or romantic novel discussed in this article is the mass-market literary genre.

In literature, a serial is a printed format by which a single larger work, often a work of narrative fiction, is published in sequential installments.

Ode (from Ancient Greek: ᾠδή ōdḗ) is a type of lyrical stanza.

Juvenilia are literary, musical or artistic works produced by an author during his or her youth.

Rithā’ (Arabic ( ءبثس ( خُثشٍ ) is a genre of Arabic poetry corresponding to elegy or lament. Along with elegy proper (marthiyah, plural marāthī), rithā’ may also contain taḥrīḍ (incitement to vengeance). The genre was used by both male and female poets, and is one of the main genres in which ancient and medieval Arabic female poets are known to have composed. Indeed, almost all our pre-Islamic women's poetry is in this form. The subjects of the rithā’ are (almost) invariably dead male warriors (fursān) and lords (sādah), predominantly those who fell in battle.

Kusazōshi (草双紙) is a term that covers various genres of popular woodblock-printed illustrated literature during the Japanese Edo Period (1600-1868) and early Meiji period.

This is a list of genres of literature and entertainment, excluding genres in the visual arts.

Fool's literature was a literary tradition in medieval Europe in which the stock character of a fool was used as an allegory to satirize the contemporary society.

A short story cycle (sometimes referred to as a story sequence or composite novel) is a collection of short stories in which the narratives are specifically composed and arranged with the goal of creating an enhanced or different experience when reading the group as a whole as opposed to its individual parts.

The social novel, also known as the social problem (or social protest) novel, is a "work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel".

Visionary fiction, classified by the Book Industry Study Group under the BISAC subject heading FIC039000 FICTION / Visionary & Metaphysical, emerged as a distinct genre around the year 2000.