Literary Genres: Narrative, Lyrical, and Dramatic Forms

The Literary Genres

The literary genres: the word genre in literature refers to a set of texts that share certain common characteristics that differentiate them from others.

For the reader, the genre is a horizon of expectations. When faced with reading a text, if you know the expected genre, you anticipate that this text meets certain requirements, although the forms of genres are elastic and change over time.

Emergence of a New Genre

The appearance of a new genre: For the Spanish theorist Fernando Gómez Redondo, the appearance of a new genre or generic group occurs if certain requirements are met:

• Innovative ideas from an author and their proposal of a different formal approach to the surrounding reality.
• The author's decision to create an original structure from both a formal and thematic standpoint.
• The adequacy of the work to the social context in which it appears.
• The imitation of the formal procedures and thematic findings by other authors.
• Recognition of the formal features of the new model.

Narrative Genre

The narrative genre: Works in the narrative genre are characterized by the presence of a storyteller who recounts fictional events that happen to characters in time and space that are more or less defined. The narrator—the voice the author creates to tell the story—can relate all the facts and present them objectively. But the narrator can also present a partial vision of events, in which case the story is usually told in the first person; it may also be told in the third person and, rarely, in the second person.

While many early narrative works were written in verse (as in The Divine Comedy), today they are usually written in prose. The most common forms of the narrative genre are the novel and the short story. Other forms include myth, fable and the chronicle.

Lyrical Genre

The lyrical genre: The lyrical genre is characterized by the strong presence of the emotional or expressive function of language. It relies on the specific use of language based on musicality and rhythm, and on the figure of the lyric speaker. In the poem, the poet expresses his or her subjectivity—emotions, feelings and a particular way of perceiving themselves and the world around them.

Drama

The drama: Dramatic works are intended for stage performance. These texts develop a story that is revealed through the dialogues of the characters, but they also contain indications from the author that guide staging—stage directions.

Unlike narrative, in which the story is mediated through the narrator's voice, in dramatic texts there are no intermediaries between the spectator and the life present in the development of dramatic action.