Literary Genres: What They Are and How to Tell Them Apart

What is a literary genre

A literary genre is the label used to classify literary works: it looks above all at how a work is written, with what technique, and only sometimes at its subject matter. The idea goes back to ancient Greece and Rome, and turns into a widespread ordering principle mostly from the Renaissance onward, when classicist tradition starts using it as a tool for sorting works that imitated ancient models, each with its own rules.

Talking about a work’s “form” means talking about its structure and how it is built, leaving the content aside. Two texts can tell the same love story and still belong to different genres: one written in prose, the other in verse; one meant for silent reading, the other for the stage. Every classification starts from there.

What are the different literary genres?

Pull the three classical modes apart from the scheme taught in school today, and “different literary genres” turns out to mean two different things. Plato split narration into three modes, one that imitates characters directly, one where the narrator speaks in the first person, and a blend of the two, describing how a story gets told. The scheme used in most classrooms sorts works by a different logic, grouping fiction, poetry and theatre, with the novel and the short story as fiction’s two prose shapes. Different type of literature, in other words, is a question with more than one answer, depending on which layer is doing the sorting — form, technique, or the oldest classical split of all.

From Plato to Aristotle: the first map of genres

The first systematic classification of poetry is credited to Plato, who built it around a work’s ethical content and its degree of mimesis, or imitation. Plato sorted narration into three modes: one where characters are imitated directly (dramatic), one where the author speaks in the first person (narrative), and one that blends the two (mixed).

Aristotle built on that distinction and opened it up, no longer treating genre as a fixed box. The classification of literary genres actually in use in the Western tradition, though, comes from the thinkers who followed him, the Peripatetic school and the scholars of Alexandria, who fixed the shape that reached us more than Aristotle himself did.

Aristotle added a criterion of his own: in his view, poetry had split into two strands from the start, depending on the character of the poet, who portrayed either noble actions or the actions of ordinary, lesser people. Tragedy, in this scheme, imitates an action of great weight, able to stir pity and fear and then release the audience from those same emotions — catharsis.

Short story and novel: two prose narratives

The novel is a prose work that follows a person, or an entire family, through events that stretch out chapter after chapter. The setting changes from book to book: it can be historical, invented out of whole cloth, or set in the present, and the events told can be real or not. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni follows this pattern: a plot set in a precise historical past, with invented characters woven into real events.

The short story, by contrast, stays short and lean in its construction: it follows a single plot line from start to finish, almost always invented, while a novel weaves several threads together. Because of its contained length, it reads in one go, in a single sitting. In English, for instance, a contemporary novel typically runs from 60,000 to about 200,000 words, while a short story has no fixed length but still stays too short to be published on its own, the way a novel is. Boccaccio’s Decameron lines up a hundred stories of exactly this kind, each one closed within its own plot.

Hands-on example: open the Decameron at any tale: in a few pages the story starts and ends, a single plot with no detours. Now pick up a chapter of The Betrothed: Renzo’s thread breaks off, moves to Lucia, comes back to Renzo, tangles with the plague and with the history of Milan. It is the same difference the sources draw between short story and novel: one line against several that interweave.

The name itself carries a piece of history: in the Middle Ages, in Romance-language literature, “novel” simply flagged that a text was written in the vernacular, the tongue descended from Latin, rather than in Latin itself, in either prose or verse. Those early texts existed mostly to entertain listeners with tales of knights and adventure.

Within the novel, subgenres split off around recurring subjects and moods: Gothic literature, for instance, begins in England in 1764 around castles hiding a secret, dark atmospheres and supernatural events, and lays the ground for the broader horror fiction genre.

Genre	Form	Purpose	How it’s read
Short story	Prose, short, single plot line	Entertain with a closed story	In one sitting
Novel	Extended prose, several storylines	Follow people or families over time	In instalments, over time
Poetry	Verse, with metre	Express feelings and images	Aloud or silently, minding the rhythm
Theatre	Dialogue written for the stage	Be performed by actors	Watched in a theatre, or read as a script

Poetry: the form in verse

Poetry is a literary form composed in verse, that is, following defined metrical rules or other formal constraints. The main difference between poetry and prose comes down to exactly that: poetry carries a metrical constraint that prose simply does not have. The sonnet pushes that constraint to an extreme, with a fixed rhyme scheme the poet has to follow line by line.

Alongside that metrical measure sits a second trait, often mentioned in the same breath: poetry carries the knack for putting intense feelings into words and calling up emotions and images in the reader’s mind. A novel can move a reader just as deeply, of course; what still defines the genre, though, is the pairing of that expressive power with the constraint of verse.

Theatre: written for the stage

In the broad sense, drama, the text written for the theatre, is a literary work built above all to be performed on a stage, taking either the path of tragedy or the path of comedy. In a narrower, more modern sense, today a drama centers on a painful episode sparked by conflict between the people living it. English speakers call individual works of this kind “plays,” and “genre” itself, more broadly, groups texts by how they are built and with what technique, only occasionally by theme. Carlo Goldoni worked directly from this staged nature: his reform of comedy starts from the idea that a script has to hold up in front of a live audience, on top of working on the page. Aristotle pointed out one more difference between the staged forms and epic poetry: tragedy and comedy were fully acted out, with music running underneath, while epic, the narrative written in verse, stuck in his time to plain recitation. In his view, that was one more reason why audiences stayed more drawn to theatre.

When genres blend: fiction literature genres in practice

Plato’s three modes, dramatic, narrative, mixed, are a reminder that the lines between genres are rarely clean. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a narrative poem: it follows a single long plot, the way a novel does, but writes it in tercets of hendecasyllables, the way poetry does. Fiction literature genres, in short, come down to a loose cluster of traits, and a single work can easily sit across more than one at once.

Spotting a genre is less about filing a work under one label than about reading its form, its purpose and the way it asks to be taken in. Writing one’s own text raises the opposite question: how to choose a genre for writing a story.