1. Genres of Literature
Fiction

2. Genres of Literature: What is Literature
Literature: “in a broad sense, to mean compositions that tell stories, dramatize situations, express emotions, and analyze and advocate ideas… Literature helps us grow, both personally and intellectually,” (Roberts & Zweig 3).

3. Types of Literature: The Genres
There are 4 categories or genres of Literature.
Prose Fiction
Poetry
Drama
Non-fiction Prose
These are classified as imaginative literature

4. Imaginative Literature: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama
Although this genre may have many things in common, there are still a great deal of differences.
Prose Fiction or Narrative Fiction:
Myths
Parables
Romances
Novels
Short Stories
“The essence of fiction is narration, the relation or recounting of a sequence of events or actions,” (Roberts & Zweig 4).

5. Imaginative Literature: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama
Poetry aims towards high levels of emotion, reflection, thought, and feeling.
Types of poems include:
Ballads, blank verse, couplets, elegies, epigrams, hymns, limericks, odes, quatrains, songs or lyrics, tercets, triplets, villanelles, haiku, epic poems, and free-verse.
“Drama is literature designed for the stage or film presentation,” (Roberts & Zweig 4).
The main point of drama is to develop the character and situation through the process of speech and action. (Roberts & Zweig 5).
Drama relies on the use of dialogue to tell it’s story.

6. Nonfiction Prose and Creative Nonfiction
Nonfiction prose consist of the following:
New reports
Feature articles
Essay
Editorials
Textbooks
Historical and biographical works
Creative Nonfiction is taking a true event or story and introducing structured form, vivid examples, relevant quotations, and highly creative and imaginative insights.

7. Fiction: meant made up or shaped. How it started
As fiction grew so did the genres:
Fables are stories that are brief and illustrate a moral truth. Mostly associated with ancient Greek.
Parables are stores that are short allegory designed to exemplify a religious truth, often involving Jesus.
Allegory: a complete narrative that may also correspond to a parallel set of moral, philosophical, political, religious, or social situations.
Fiction begin with the telling of stories through oral speeches. These stories were passed down from generation to generation. These as we known them are MYTHS: ancient legends. Many of these myths were often made up and many have still survived today. A story of a longer length is know as an EPIC. These stories were told over days.

8. Modern Fiction
Fiction become very poplar in the 17th and 18th centuries. The first type of fiction in this era was known as the Romance: coming from Spain and France; modern formulaic stories describing the growth of an impulsive, passionate, and powerful love relationship.
This later become known as the Novel, which means new in French and Italian.
The short story has become the most poplar of all fiction. In the 19th century Edgar Allan Poe developed the short story. Deciding that reading a long novel was much too intense for some people.
Short Story: a compact, concentrated work of narrative fiction that may also contain description, dialogue, and commentary.
Poe believed the form should create a “powerful and unified impact,” (Roberts & Zweig 64).

9. Elements of Fiction
Verisimilitude and Donnée are to very important features of Fiction.
Verisimilitude or realism is the basis that a story needs to feel realistic in a sense. Meaning that characters and situations are relatable.
Donnée is French for given; the given action or set of assumptions on which a work of literature is based; such as the unpredictability of love, the bleakness of danger in a postwar world, or the inescapability of guilt.
Common elements of Fiction are: Plot Character Idea or Theme Tone and Style Symbolism and Allegory Setting Structure