Classifying Literature

The last post must have given you at least a vague idea of what literature is in general. Moving on, in this post we are going to see how we can classify literature. There are many ways to classify it and we are going to explore some of the major varieties.

When we classify literature, we call each variety as a ‘genre’. We can classify literary genres based on various factors. In this post, we will consider five of them – Form, Theme, Cultural Background/Geographic Location, Age, and Format. There are also ‘sub-genres’  in each literary genre. Classifying is a bit tricky and many genres will overlap one another but, I will try to make it clear as much as possible.

Based on its form, literature is broadly classified into two – Poetry and Prose. These are the two main genres of literature. The other means…