What is Literature

Literature is writing in which ideas of permanent and universal values or interests are
expressed in a deliberately embellished language the purpose of which is to please (both
sensually and intellectually) and teach by indirection. Compare this definition that gives us a
clear idea of literature as both content (what is said) and medium (how content is expressed) to
the following definition by Ezra Pound: Literature is language charged with meaning. Great
literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree (ABC 28).
The polarity of opinion regarding the exact nature of literature captures the age old debate
on whether literature or literariness should be judged merely by the subject or content of a work
or by the style of its expression. We shall leave this question for now because you will have to
form your own opinion as you get to understand the workings of literature and be able to defend
it with facts or illustrations. However, some of the foremost things that a reader needs to know
about literature are its constitutive elements or characteristics, viz: imagination, creativity,
suggestion or indirection.
What is Genre
Genre (/nr/ or /dnr/; from French, genre French pronunciation: [ ()], "kind"
or "sort", from Latin: genus (stem gener-), Greek: genos, ) is any category of literature or
other forms of art or entertainment, e.g. music, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based
on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new
genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple
genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.
Genre began as an absolute classification system for ancient Greek literature. Poetry,
prose and performance had a specific and calculated style that related to the theme of the story.
Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, and even actors were restricted
to their genre under the assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best. In later
periods genres proliferated and developed in response to changes in audiences and creators.
Genre became a dynamic tool to help the public make sense out of unpredictable art. Because art
is often a response to a social state, in that people write/paint/sing/dance about what they know
about, the use of genre as a tool must be able to adapt to changing meanings. In fact as far back
as ancient Greece, new art forms were emerging that called for the evolution of genre, for
example the tragicomedy.
Genre suffers from the same ills of any classification system. Genre is to be reassessed
and scrutinized, and to weigh works on their unique merit. It has been suggested that genres
resonate with people because of the familiarity, the shorthand communication, as well as the
tendency of genres to shift with public mores and to reflect the zeitgeist. While the genre of

storytelling has been relegated as lesser form of art because of the heavily borrowed nature of the
conventions, admiration has grown. Proponents argue that the genius of an effective genre piece
is in the variation, recombination, and evolution of the codes.
Genre in Literature
A literary genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by
literary technique, tone, content, or even (as in the case of fiction) length. Genre should not be
confused with age category, by which literature may be classified as either adult, young-adult, or
children's. They also must not be confused with format, such as graphic novel or picture book.
The distinctions between genres and categories are flexible and loosely defined, often with
subgroups.
The most general genres in literature are (in loose chronological order) epic, tragedy,1
comedy, novel, and short story. They can all be in the genres prose or poetry, which shows best
how loosely genres are defined. Additionally, a genre such as satire, allegory or pastoral might
appear in any of the above, not only as a subgenre (see below), but as a mixture of genres.
Finally, they are defined by the general cultural movement of the historical period in which they
were composed. In popular fiction, which is especially divided by genres, genre fiction is the
more usual term.
In literature, genre has been known as an intangible taxonomy. This taxonomy implies a
concept of containment or that an idea will be stable forever. The earliest recorded systems of
genre in Western history can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. Grard Genette, a French
literary theorist and author of The Architext, describes Plato as creating three Imitational genres:
dramatic dialogue, pure narrative and epic (a mixture of dialogue and narrative). Lyric poetry,
the fourth and final type of Greek literature, was excluded by Plato as a non-mimetic mode.
Aristotle later revised Plato's system by eliminating the pure narrative as a viable mode and
distinguishing by two additional criteria: the object to be imitated, as objects could be either
superior or inferior, and the medium of presentation such as words, gestures or verse. Essentially,
the three categories of mode, object, and medium can be visualized along an XYZ axis.
Excluding the criteria of medium, Aristotle's system distinguished four types of classical
genres: tragedy (superior-dramatic dialogue), epic (superior-mixed narrative), comedy (inferiordramatic dialogue), and parody (inferior-mixed narrative). Genette continues by explaining the
later integration of lyric poetry into the classical system during the romantic period, replacing the
now removed pure narrative mode. Lyric poetry, once considered non-mimetic, was deemed to
imitate feelings, becoming the third leg of a new tripartite system: lyrical, epical, and dramatic
dialogue. This system, which came to "dominate all the literary theory of German romanticism
(and therefore well beyond)", has seen numerous attempts at expansion or revision. However,
1 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1983). "Epic and Novel". In Holquist, Michael. The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, page. 3.

more ambitious efforts to expand the tripartite system resulted in new taxonomic systems of
increasing scope and complexity.
Genette reflects upon these various systems, comparing them to the original tripartite
arrangement: "its structure is somewhat superior tothose that have come after, fundamentally
flawed as they are by their inclusive and hierarchical taxonomy, which each time immediately
brings the whole game to a standstill and produces an impasse". Taxonomy allows for a
structured classification system of genre, as opposed to a more contemporary rhetorical model of
genre. The concept of "genre" has been criticized by Jacques Derrida.
Novel
A novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and
events, usually in the form of a sequential story. While Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957)
suggests that the novel came into being in the early 18th century, the genre has also been
described as "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", 2 with
historical roots in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, and in the
tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the
present generic English term in the 18th century. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is
frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era; the first part of Don
Quixote was published in 1605.3
While a more precise definition of the genre is difficult, the main elements that critics
discuss are: how the narrative, and especially the plot, is constructed; the themes, settings, and
characterization; how language is used; and the way that plot, character, and setting relate to
reality.
The romance is a related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious
narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon
incidents", whereas in the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human
events and the modern state of society". However, many romances, including the historical
romances of Scott, Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are
also frequently called novels, and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". Romance, as
defined here, should not be confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel.
Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman,
der Roman, il romanzo."

2 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1996, rept. 1997, page. 1.
3 Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Kathleen Kuiper, ed. 1995. MerriamWebster, Springfield, Mass.

Defining the Genre of Novel

The novel in the modern era usually makes use of a literary prose style, and the
development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in printing, and the
introduction of cheap paper, in the 15th century.
The present English (and Spanish) word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the
Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin
novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning
"new".4 Most European languages have preserved the term "romance" (as in French, Dutch,
Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian "roman"; German
"Roman"; Portuguese "romance" and Italian "romanzo") for extended narratives.
A fictional narrative
Fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from historiography.
However this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern period authors of
historical narratives would often include inventions rooted in traditional beliefs in order to
embellish a passage of text or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would also invent and
compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social,
political and personal realities of a place and period with clarity and detail not found in works of
history.
However, up until the 1750s historians were the main critics of the novel and they
emphasised its lack of veracity and therefore serious worth, and criticised it for being merely
entertainment. Then in the second half of the 18th-century criticism evolved and with
Romanticism came the idea that works of fiction could be art.
Literary prose
While prose rather than verse became the standard of the modern novel, the ancestors of
the modern European novel include verse epics in the Romance language of southern France,
especially those by Chrtien de Troyes (late 12th century), and in Middle English (Geoffrey
Chaucer's (c. 1343 1400) The Canterbury Tales). Even in the 19th century, fictional narratives
in verse, such as Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824), Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin (1833),
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), competed with prose novels. Vikram

4 The term novel is a truncation of the Italian word novella (from the plural of Latin novellus,
a late variant of novus, meaning "new"), so that what is now, in most languages, a
diminutive denotes historically the parent form. The novella was a kind of enlarged anecdote
like those to be found in the 14th-century Italian classic Boccaccio's Decameron, each of
which exemplifies the etymology well enough.

Seth's The Golden Gate (1986), composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of
the verse novel.5
However, in the 15th century, following the invention of printing, prose began to
dominate European fiction. This immediately led to the development of a special elevated prose
style modelled on Greek and Roman histories, and the traditions of verse narrative. The
development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that aimed at creating
works that readers would actually identify, and appreciate, as fiction rather than history.
At the beginning of the 16th century, printing had created a special demand for books that
were neither simply published for the nonacademic audience nor explicitly scientific literature,
but belles-lettres. This included modern history and science in the vernacular, personal memoirs,
contemporary political scandal, fiction and poetry. However, prose fiction was soon far more
popular than verse, rhetoric and science. Fictional prose, though aiming for stylistic elegance,
was closer to everyday language, to personal letters, to the art of "gallant" conversation, and to
the personal memoir and travelogue. Pierre Daniel Huet summarised the stylistic ambition of
fictional prose accordingly in 1670: "It must be compos'd with Art and Elegance, lest it should
appear to be a rude undigested Mass, without Order or Beauty." 6
By the 18th century, however, English authors began to criticize the French ideals of
belles lettres elegance, and a less aristocratic prose style became the ideal for them in the 1740s.
When, in the 1760s, it became the norm for the author to open his or her novel with a statement
of the work's fictionality, the prose became even more informal.
Media: paper and print
The development of printing technology, along with the availability of paper, changed the
situation for prose fiction. Paper allowed the production of cheap books that would not
necessarily be read twice, and which could be bought exclusively for private diversion. The new
medium produced the modern novel in Europe in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. The
formats duodecimo and octavo, or small quarto in the case of chapbooks, immediately created
books which could be read privately at home, or in public, without the support of a table. To read
novels in coffee houses, or on journeys, became part of early modern reading culture.7

5 Op.cit, page. 137

6 Huet, PierreDaniel, Traitt de l'origine des romans (1670), Stephen Lewis' 1715
translation, The History of Romances, page. 3-4.
7 See Johann Friedrich Riederer's "Satyra von den Liebes-Romanen", in: Die abentheuerliche
Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kapagee, vol. 2 (Nrnberg, 1718) with descriptions of the
diverse situations in which people read novels at the beginning of the 18th century at
Marteau.

Content: intimate experience

Both in 12th-century Japan and 15th-century Europe, prose fiction created intimate
reading situations. On the other hand verse epics, including the Odyssey and Aeneid, had been
recited to a select audiences, though this was a more intimate experience than the performance of
plays in theaters. The late medieval commercial manuscript production created a market of
private books, but it still required the customer to contact the professional copyist with the book
a person wanted to have copied, a situation that restricted the development of a more private
reading experience. The invention of the printing press, in the 15th century, however, totally
altered the situation.
A new world of Individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret
anxieties, "conduct" and "gallantry" spread with novels and the associated prose-romance. Love
also became a major subject for novels. Pierre Huet, in an early definition of the novel, or
romance, noted: "I call them Fictions, to discriminate them from True Histories; and I add, of
Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the Principal Subject of Romance." 8 The reader is
invited to personally identify emotionally with a novel's characters, whereas historians aim
ideally at objectivity.
Length
The novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the novella,
short story, and flash fiction. However, in the 17th century critics saw the romance as of epic
length and the novel as its short rival. A precise definition of the differences in length between
these types of fiction, is, however, not possible.
The length of a novel can still be important because most literary awards use length as a
criterion in the ranking system.9 The Booker Prize in 2007 created a serious debate with its shortlisting of Ian McEwan's 166-page work On Chesil Beach, with some critics stating that McEwan
had at best written a novella.10

8 Huet, PierreDaniel, Traitt de l'origine des romans (1670), Stephen Lewis' 1715
translation, The History of Romances, page. 3-4.
9 The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award gives the following
guidelines: Novel 40,000 words or more; Novella 17,50039,999 words; Novelette
7,50017,499 words; Short Story 7,499 words or fewer. For this purpose, "word" is
understood to be five characters plus one space, so, a novel must have at least 240,000
characters-with-spaces, which, in practice, does make about one hundred printed pages, a
reasonable length for a novel.
10 Ian McEwan's new novel has been greeted with unqualified, sometimes ecstatic, praise
from every reviewer in Britain, which may strike some readers here as a bit odd when they
read the book. For a start, it's not a novel. It's barely even a novella. In some ways it's more
a long short story, built around a single event and involving just two charactersif it was a
play it would be a one-act two-hander.

The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that a novel
should encompass the "totality of life."11
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic12 qualities of language
such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metreto evoke meanings in addition to, or in
place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.
Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems
evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with
the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in
rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition,
verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more
objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. From the mid-20th century, poetry has
sometimes been more generally regarded as a fundamental creative act employing language.
Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to
evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are
sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism,
irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple
interpretations. Similarly figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and metonymy13 create a
resonance between otherwise disparate imagesa layering of meanings, forming connections
previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in
their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.
Some poetry types are specific to particular cultures and genres and respond to
characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying
poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on
rhyme and regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other
means to create rhythm and euphony. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic
tradition,14 playing with and testing, among other things, the principle of euphony itself,
sometimes altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm. 15 In today's increasingly globalized world,
poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages.
11 Gyrgy Lukcs The Theory of the Novel. A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of
great epic literature [first German edition 1920], transl. by Anna Bostock (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971).
12 "Poetry". Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. 2013.
13 Strachan, John R; Terry, Richard, G (2000). Poetry: an introduction. Edinburgh University
Press. page. 119.
14 Eliot, TS (1999). "The Function of Criticism". Selected Essays. Faber & Faber. page. 1334.
15 Longenbach, James (1997). Modern Poetry After Modernism. Oxford University Press.

Poetry is also the oldest of the three major forms of literature with roots deep in the
rituals and religious observances of antiquity. Thus it was mainly oral, performance-driven and
public as it was, more often than not, a tool for supplication, communal tribal celebration and
celebration of the supernatural as well as appreciation of the gifts of nature. From these early
beginnings developed the personal and impersonal forms of poetry represented by the lyric on
the one hand and the traditional epic and ballad on the other. Since we shall dwell on this form
(poetry) in more detail in subsequent sections of this course material, we shall now move on to
briefly enumerate the defining characteristics, namely: imagery, sound, rhythm and diction.
-

Imagery is the sensory language used in poetry. By sensory we imply that the language
appeals to or affects the senses of the reader or audience.
Sound is the auditory aspect or quality inherent in poetry. The importance of this
characteristic lies in the fact that poetry is meant to be heard and in its original form it
was a song and most short lyrics today still retain this character.
Rhythm is the wave-like movement discernible in poetry. It accounts, along with sound,
for the musical quality in poetry.
Diction refers to the special choice or selection of words utilised by the poet in his work.

Genres of Poetry
Poetry is often thought of in terms of different genres and subgenres. A poetic genre is
generally a tradition or classification of poetry based on the subject matter, style, or other broader
literary characteristics. Some commentators view genres as natural forms of literature. Others
view the study of genres as the study of how different works relate and refer to other works.16
Narrative poetry
Narrative poetry is a genre of poetry that tells a story. Broadly it subsumes epic poetry,
but the term "narrative poetry" is often reserved for smaller works, generally with more appeal to
human interest. Narrative poetry may be the oldest type of poetry. Many scholars of Homer have
concluded that his Iliad and Odyssey were composed from compilations of shorter narrative
poems that related individual episodes. Much narrative poetrysuch as Scottish and English
ballads, and Baltic and Slavic heroic poemsis performance poetry with roots in a preliterate
oral tradition. It has been speculated that some features that distinguish poetry from prose, such
as meter, alliteration and kennings, once served as memory aids for bards who recited traditional
tales.17
Epic poetry
Epic poetry is a genre of poetry, and a major form of narrative literature. This genre is
often defined as lengthy poems concerning events of a heroic or important nature to the culture
16 Schafer, Jorgen; Gendolla, Peter, ed. (2010). Beyond the screen: transformations of
literary structures, interfaces and genres. Verlag. page. 16, 391402.
17 Homer and the Oral Tradition (reprinted.). Cambridge University Press. page. 2245

of the time. It recounts, in a continuous narrative, the life and works of a heroic or mythological
person or group of persons.18 Examples of epic poems are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's
Aeneid, the Nibelungenlied, Lus de Cames' Os Lusadas, the Cantar de Mio Cid, the Epic of
Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, Valmiki's Ramayana, Ferdowsi's Shahnama, Nizami (or Nezami)'s
Khamse (Five Books), and the Epic of King Gesar. While the composition of epic poetry, and of
long poems generally, became less common in the west after the early 20th century, some notable
epics have continued to be written. Derek Walcott won a Nobel prize to a great extent on the
basis of his epic, Omeros.
Dramatic poetry
Dramatic poetry is drama written in verse to be spoken or sung, and appears in varying,
sometimes related forms in many cultures. Greek tragedy in verse dates to the 6th century B.C.,
and may have been an influence on the development of Sanskrit drama, 19 just as Indian drama in
turn appears to have influenced the development of the bianwen verse dramas in China,
forerunners of Chinese Opera.20 East Asian verse dramas also include Japanese Noh. Examples
of dramatic poetry in Persian literature include Nizami's two famous dramatic works, Layla and
Majnun and Khosrow and Shirin, Ferdowsi's tragedies such as Rostam and Sohrab, Rumi's
Masnavi, Gorgani's tragedy of Vis and Ramin, and Vahshi's tragedy of Farhad.
Satirical poetry
Poetry can be a powerful vehicle for satire. The Romans had a strong tradition of satirical
poetry, often written for political purposes. A notable example is the Roman poet Juvenal's
satires.21
The same is true of the English satirical tradition. John Dryden (a Tory), the first Poet
Laureate, produced in 1682 Mac Flecknoe, subtitled "A Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet,
T.S." (a reference to Thomas Shadwell).22 Another master of 17th-century English satirical poetry
was John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester.23 Satirical poets outside England include Poland's
Ignacy Krasicki, Azerbaijan's Sabir and Portugal's Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage.
18 Hainsworth, JB (1989). Traditions of heroic and epic poetry. Modern Humanities Research
Association. page. 171175.
19 Keith, Arthur Berriedale Keith (1992). Sanskrit Drama in its origin, development, theory
and practice. Motilal Banarsidass. page. 5758.
20 Dolby, William (1983). "Early Chinese Plays and Theatre". In Mackerras, Colin. Chinese
Theater: From Its Origins to the Present Day. University of Hawaii Press. p. 17.
21 Ominik, William J; Wehrle, T (1999). Roman verse satire: Lucilius to Juvenal. BolchazyCarducci. page. 13
22 Black, Joseph, ed. (2011). Broadview Anthology of British Literature 1. Broadview Press.
p. 1056
23 Treglown, Jeremy (1973). "Satirical Inversion of Some English Sources in Rochester's
Poetry". Review of English Studies 24 (93): 4248.

Light poetry
Light poetry, or light verse, is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Poems considered
"light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature word
play, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration. Although a few free verse poets
have excelled at light verse outside the formal verse tradition, light verse in English is usually
formal. Common forms include the limerick, the clerihew, and the double dactyl.
While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel, or thought of as poetry
composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of
the most renowned "serious" poets have also excelled at light verse. Notable writers of light
poetry include Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash, X. J. Kennedy, Willard R. Espy, and Wendy Cope.
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre that, unlike epic and dramatic poetry, does not attempt to tell a
story but instead is of a more personal nature. Poems in this genre tend to be shorter, melodic,
and contemplative. Rather than depicting characters and actions, it portrays the poet's own
feelings, states of mind, and perceptions.24 Notable poets in this genre include John Donne,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Antonio Machado.
Elegy
An elegy is a mournful, melancholy or plaintive poem, especially a lament for the dead or
a funeral song. The term "elegy," which originally denoted a type of poetic meter (elegiac meter),
commonly describes a poem of mourning. An elegy may also reflect something that seems to the
author to be strange or mysterious. The elegy, as a reflection on a death, on a sorrow more
generally, or on something mysterious, may be classified as a form of lyric poetry.25
Verse fable
The fable is an ancient literary genre, often (though not invariably) set in verse. It is a
succinct story that features anthropomorphized animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of
nature that illustrate a moral lesson (a "moral"). Verse fables have used a variety of meter and
rhyme patterns.26

24 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk (2006). Lyric poetry : the pain and the pleasure of words. Princeton
University Press. page. 122.
25 Pigman, GW (1985). Grief and English Renaissance elegy. Cambridge University Press.
page. 4047
26 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt; Abrams, MH. A glossary of literary terms (10th ed.). Wadsworth
Cengage Learning. p. 9.

Prose poetry
Prose poetry is a hybrid genre that shows attributes of both prose and poetry. It may be
indistinguishable from the micro-story (a.k.a. the "short short story", "flash fiction"). While some
examples of earlier prose strike modern readers as poetic, prose poetry is commonly regarded as
having originated in 19th-century France, where its practitioners included Aloysius Bertrand,
Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Stphane Mallarm. Since the late 1980s especially,
prose poetry has gained increasing popularity, with entire journals, such as The Prose Poem: An
International Journal, Contemporary Haibun Online devoted to that genre.
Speculative poetry
Speculative poetry, also known as fantastic poetry, (of which weird or macabre poetry is a
major subclassification), is a poetic genre which deals thematically with subjects which are
'beyond reality', whether via extrapolation as in science fiction or via weird and horrific themes
as in horror fiction. Such poetry appears regularly in modern science fiction and horror fiction
magazines. Edgar Allan Poe is sometimes seen as the "father of speculative poetry".27
References

Allen, Mike (2005). Dutcher, Roger, ed. The alchemy of stars. Science Fiction Poetry Association.
page. 1117.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1983). "Epic and Novel". In Holquist, Michael. The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, page. 3.
Black, Joseph, ed. (2011). Broadview Anthology of British Literature 1. Broadview Press. p. 1056
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk (2006). Lyric poetry : the pain and the pleasure of words. Princeton University
Press. page. 122.
Dolby, William (1983). "Early Chinese Plays and Theatre". In Mackerras, Colin. Chinese Theater: From Its
Origins to the Present Day. University of Hawaii Press. p. 17.
Eliot, TS (1999). "The Function of Criticism". Selected Essays. Faber & Faber. page. 1334.
Gyrgy Lukcs The Theory of the Novel. A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic
literature [first German edition 1920], transl. by Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
1971).
Hainsworth, JB (1989). Traditions of heroic and epic poetry. Modern Humanities Research Association.
page. 171175.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt; Abrams, MH. A glossary of literary terms (10th ed.). Wadsworth Cengage
Learning. p. 9.
Homer and the Oral Tradition (reprinted.). Cambridge University Press. page. 2245
Huet, PierreDaniel, Traitt de l'origine des romans (1670), Stephen Lewis' 1715 translation, The History
of Romances, page. 3-4.
Keith, Arthur Berriedale Keith (1992). Sanskrit Drama in its origin, development, theory and practice.
Motilal Banarsidass. page. 5758.
Longenbach, James (1997). Modern Poetry After Modernism. Oxford University Press.
Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996,
rept. 1997, page. 1.

27 Allen, Mike (2005). Dutcher, Roger, ed. The alchemy of stars. Science Fiction Poetry
Association. page. 1117.

Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Kathleen Kuiper, ed. 1995. Merriam-Webster, Springfield,

Mass.
Ominik, William J; Wehrle, T (1999). Roman verse satire: Lucilius to Juvenal. Bolchazy-Carducci.
page. 13
Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. 2013.
Pigman, GW (1985). Grief and English Renaissance elegy. Cambridge University Press. page. 4047
Schafer, Jorgen; Gendolla, Peter, ed. (2010). Beyond the screen: transformations of literary structures,
interfaces and genres. Verlag. page. 16, 391402.
Strachan, John R; Terry, Richard, G (2000). Poetry: an introduction. Edinburgh University Press.
page. 119.
Treglown, Jeremy (1973). "Satirical Inversion of Some English Sources in Rochester's Poetry". Review of
English Studies 24 (93): 4248.