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…

As we are going to talk about literature and all its forms in this blog, let us start our exploration with the primary question of what ‘Literature’ actually is.  It is a really broad term and it is impossible to define it within a single blog post as it is impossible to define it itself. So, today, we are going to discuss what literature is etymologically and with the help of three other theories namely – Aesthetics, Value-Judgment, and Formalism.

The word ‘literature’ is derived from the Latin word ‘littera’ which means ‘a letter of the alphabet’. If we are going to define literature by etymology, then it means literature is restricted to written forms and thus will restrict it only to the languages which have a written form.  This raises two important questions – “Is it literature only if it is written?” and “Is anything written becomes literature?”