Writing genres

Categories time!

These lists are very Britain-centric. I include some works by writers outside this country, but mainly only if they have influenced writers from here. So Greek, Italian, Scandinavian and French writers all get a look in - but mainly because most of them invaded Britain at one point, so they brought their writings with them. Others simply influenced the whole of Europe (Greeks).

When I was at University I divided the literary time periods I was studying into the following:

Ancient - 800BC - 500AD
Celtic/Saxon/Norse - 500 - 1066
Medieval - 1066 - 1485
Renaissance - 1485 - 1660
Restoration - 1660-1750
Romantic - 1750-1837
Victorian - 1837-1901
Modern - 1901-1945
Post-modern - 1945-present

Some people will disagree with those categories, and some people will disagree with the dates. I've based the dates around historical events rather than by literary works, purely because that's easier for me to divide it up in my head. But some people do it differently, and that's fine. I just use this to help me.


Next, we have the actual literary categories: prose, verse and drama. These are very, very broad categories, so they are divided up into many sub-categories.

Prose is divided into fiction and non-fiction.

Fiction sub-categories - short story and novel.

Non-fiction sub-categories - autobiography, biography, essay, polemic, review and treatise. 

Verse sub-categories - epic, lyric, mock epic, poem, sonnet. 

Drama categories - play and screenplay.

Within these sub-categories are a HUGE number of different genres. Often they cross over into one another, which can be confusing.

Generally, genres of all literary works - action, adventure, burlesque, comedy, crime, criticism, dystopia, erotica, faction, fantasy, historical, horror, humanities, mystery, mythological, paranoid, pastoral, philosophical, political, romance, saga, satire, science, science fiction, slice of life, speculative, thriller, tragedy, urban and utopia.


Right, so why am I doing this? Because it's important to know. In order to write, you have to read. Reading is fantastic for research: you can understand all the different categories and genres of writing and how they're done and find some brilliant authors within each category who have written those forms well. It's a fantastic way of improving as a writer.

Of course, there are further sub-divisions within those literary genres (I know, I know, there are endless different forms of everything!). But I'll get into that later, when I look at prose, verse and drama from each time period in turn...