Importance of Literary Genres

The literature as an art form put into words.- Literature as an art form is one of the oldest being that exists since time immemorial in which the peoples wrote their stories and their exploits for the posterity. Literature is today a complex set of artistic forms that, although they share the same written word differ greatly in form, style, length, and interest or purpose of what is compose.

This is how literary genres arise, different types of literary composition that points to different goals and to express different forms of perhaps the same reality. The importance of literary genres is that they are the basis of all written elaboration whenever we talk about the writing like art. Thus, each literary genre contributes its own richness to a fact that can be told in different ways. When we talk about literary genres we must mention three main genres: the epic-narrative genre, the lyrical and the dramatic.

An opportunity to get to know them better: characteristics and differences of literary genres

To better understand each literary genre, it is necessary to characterize it and distinguish it from the others. In the first place we must mention the epic-narrative genre, perhaps the one that is most widely consumed today since it includes the subgenres of short stories and novels. In addition, within this genre there are also the epic, the epic, the epic song (three subgenres related to war and war themes) and the fable (closely linked to the mythology and fantasy).

All these subgenres within the epic-narrative are written in prose. In second place we find the lyrical genre, which encompasses all the forms that we know as poetry: the song, the satire, the ode, the elegy, the hymn, the romance and the epigram. Each of these subgenres has in turn characteristics about its format, duration and themes.

Finally, we find the dramatic genre that is from which all the plays and scripts of movies we know today: tragedy, comedy, melodrama, tragicomedy and farce are its subgenres. The dramatic genre is the second most widespread thanks to the proliferation of scripts.

The words are the same, the compositions are different

In the same way that it happens with other arts, in literature the base of the composition is the written words. These are always the same, as is carmine for the painter or marble for the sculptor. But the work of words and their transformation into something higher, specific and with certain characteristics is what makes the writer an artist.

In general, writers are inclined to write within a literary genre due to the comfort with which they do it but also because of what they want to tell and how.

Images: iStock. urfinguss / olegkalina