Library: American Literature by Credo Reference: General Information

Literary Genres

Detective fiction: Topic Page
Genre of novel or short story in which a mystery is solved mainly by the action of a professional or amateur detective. Where the mystery to be solved concerns a crime, the work may be called crime fiction.
Historical novel: Topic Page
A novel with a period in history as its setting, which includes historical events and characters.
Letters: Topic Page
In literature, written messages, ranging from those addressed to the public and those sent from lover to lover, to business letters and thank-you notes. The common quality they share is a lively style, echoing the personality of the sender yet aimed at the mind and heart of the receiver.
Mystery: Topic Page
Or mystery story, literary genre in which the cause (or causes) of a mysterious happening, often a crime, is gradually revealed by the hero or heroine.
Novel: Topic Page
In modern literary usage, a sustained work of prose fiction a volume or more in length. It is distinguished from the short story and the fictional sketch, which are necessarily brief.
Pastoral: Topic Page
Literary work in which the shepherd's life is presented in a conventionalized manner. In this convention the purity and simplicity of shepherd life is contrasted with the corruption and artificiality of the court or the city. The pastoral is found in poetry, drama, and fiction, and many subjects.
Romance: Topic Page
In literature, tales of love and chivalric adventure, in verse or prose, that became popular in France about 1200 and spread throughout Europe.
Short story: Topic Page
Short work of prose fiction, usually consisting of between 500 and 10,000 words, which typically either sets up and resolves a single narrative point or depicts a mood or an atmosphere.

Poetry Forms

Ballad: Topic Page
In literature, short, narrative poem usually relating a single, dramatic event. Two forms of the ballad are often distinguished—the folk ballad, dating from about the 12th century, and the literary ballad, dating from the late 18th century.
Concrete poetry: Topic Page
Poetry which conveys meaning through the physical arrangement of the words on the page as well as through the words themselves.
Ode: Topic Page
A lyric poem, usually a fairly long one, with lines of different lengths and complex rhythms, addressed to a particular person or thing.
Poetry: Topic Page
Imaginative literary form, particularly suitable for describing emotions and thoughts. Poetry is highly ‘compressed’ writing, often using figures of speech to talk about one thing in terms of another.
Rondeau: Topic Page
A poem of 13 or sometimes 10 lines with only two rhymes, and with the first line used as a refrain after the eighth and thirteenth lines.
Sestina
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
The most complicated of the verseforms initiated by the troubadours (q.v.), the s. is composed of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by an envoi (q.v.) of three lines, all of which are unrhymed.
Sonnet: Topic Page
A short poem with 14 lines of 10 or 11 syllables each and a regular rhyming pattern according to the scheme: the Italian sonnet consists of an octave and a sestet, whereas the English sonnet consists of three quatrains and ends with a rhyming couplet.
Villanelle
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Introduced into France in the 16th c. the v. first had as its only distinguishing features a pastoral subject and use of a refrain; in other respects it was without rule, although a sequence of four 8-line stanzas with a refrain of one or two lines repeated at the end of each stanza.

Literary Movements

Beat Generation: Topic Page
Beat Poets refers to a literary cluster of poets and writers who achieved notoriety during the years after World War II through the early 1960s.
Electronic poetry
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Electronic poems typically include one or more of the following: multimedia, animation, sound effects or soundtracks, reader interaction in the form of choices or other participatory features, and automated behaviors.
Harlem Renaissance: Topic Page
Term used to describe a flowering of African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem district of New York City.
Imagism
From The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A school of poetry which flourished in England and America between 1912 and 1914 and emphasized the virtues of clarity, compression, and precision.
Magic Realism: Topic Page
A type of post-modernist fiction that mixes elements of fantasy, fable, and folklore with realistic narrative, imbuing it with a fabulous or dreamlike quality.
Modernism: Topic Page
Modernism is based on a concern with form and the exploration of technique as opposed to content and narrative. In literature, writers experimented with alternatives to orthodox sequential storytelling.
Performance poetry
From Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature
Performance poetry is largely known in the forms produced by Caribbean poets and African American poets, the latter clearly influenced by the radical politics of the 1950s/60s Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones).
Poetry Slam
From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
A contest in which poets compete against each other with judges (chosen at random from the audience) assigning a score to each performance .
Romanticism: Topic Page
A late 18c and early 19c movement in art, literature and music, characterized by an emphasis on feelings and emotions, often using imagery taken from nature, and creating forms which are relatively free from rules and set orders.
Transcendentalism: Topic Page
Transcendentalism was a series of new ideas that flourished among writers and philosophers in New England during the 19th century.

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