What are Genres?

Literary works may be categorized according to four basic genres—narrative, exposition, drama, and poetry. Within these genres, we may identify subcategories, called subgenres, that follow more particular conventions.

Conventions are basic practices or procedures writers develop over time in order to produce new works of literature. As a result of those conventions, certain recognizable kinds of literature—genres—emerge. When we are able to categorize a literary work by genre, we are able to approach the work with certain expectations, which makes interpretation somewhat easier. 

If attending a superhero movie, which is a type of drama, for example, one expects to see at least one heroic character displaying superhuman abilities.

However, much of the joy in reading or seeing a literary work comes from a great writer defying established conventions to create something unexpected. 

If the superhero spoke like Humphrey Bogart and solved cases like a 1930s detective, the film might be less conventional. Or perhaps he speaks in iambic pentameter and lives in Elizabethan England.

Some dramas (or stories or essays or poems) are better than others. But why?

A conventional work bores us after a single reading—or, worse, bores us during the first reading. A true work of literary art holds up to rereading because of the strength of its other elements. Literature lasts.

Still, each of the four basic genres follows one convention so fundamental that we can define it and orient ourselves with regard to what the story or textbook or play or poem wants to do for us.

Narrative tells a story. Exposition teaches. Drama imitates action. Poetry is verbal art—the purest genre.

Read on to learn more about them.