Genre

Presented By: Presented To:

 Fatima Kainat  Mr. Yousaf Malik
 Uswa Aslam
 Mehran Akhtar
 Contents

1. History of Genre

2. Importance of Genre
Word Origin
• Word Origin for genre as a
French word "kind, sort, style“

• Used especially in French for

"independent style."
Classical Period (800-200 BCE)
• This concept of genre originated from the
classification systems of Greek literature
created by Plato.

• Plato divided literature into the three

classic genres accepted in Ancient Greece:
 Poetry
 Drama
 Prose
The Medieval Period (455 CE-1485 CE):

 Dark ages
 Expansion in genres of poetry and
drama
 Ballads
 Morality & Miracle plays
The Renaissance and Reformation
(1485-1660 CE)
 Queen Elizabeth reign is marked by the
early works
of Shakespeare, Marlowe, John Donne
and Sidney.
 Poetry (Sonnet)
 Tragedies/ Comedies/ Histories
The Enlightenment (Neoclassical)
Period (1660-1790 CE)
 "Neoclassical" refers to the increased
influence of Classical literature upon
these centuries.
 Sample writers include:
 John Dryden, John Locke, Sir William
Temple, and Samuel Pepys in England.
 Alexander Pope introduced
 Mock Epic
 Descriptive Poetry
 Narrative Poetry
 Satirical Poems
• Henry Feilding and Jane Austen
popularized fiction writing.
Romantic Age (1798-1832)
 Sonnets/Ballads/Romantic Epic/Odes.
 Divine Poetry
 Ode writing >>>> John Keats
 Social Novels of lower middle class
 Critical writing/Lyrical poems
The Modern Period (1914-1945 CE)

• In Britain, modernist writers include

W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan
Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia
Woolf, and Wilfred Owen.
• In America, the modernist
period includes Robert
Frost and Flannery O'Connor.
 Marks the rise of black writers such
as Baldwin and Ellison.

 Realism is the dominant fashion.

 Social/Satirical/Comical/Ironical plays.

 Scientific Fiction
The Postmodern Period (1945 -
onward)
 T.S Eliot
 Morrison,
 Shaw,
 Beckett,
 Calvino,
 Ginsberg,
 Pynchon, and other modern writers, poets, and
playwrights experimented with fragmented poetry.
Importance of Genre
• Genre: in literary studies, film, anthropology, study
of folklore, music

• In applied linguistics, three approaches to genre:

• The English for specific purposes ( ESP) approach
• The New Rhetoric approach
• The functional-systemic approach (Halliday)
Further Significance
• Genre is Multi-Disciplinary.

• Genre may have variations.

• Genre is very broad in vision.

• Genre is versatile.
• It shows to the people how language is
used and shaped according to
environment.

• Genre help us to understand the hidden

meaning of the author.
THANKYOU 