A genre is a particular type of literature, painting, music, film, or other art form which people consider as a class because it has special characteristics.
Though, of course, genres are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and many series do straddle multiple genres. The items on this list attempt to define these characteristics.
Story-professionals, like John Truby, & Shawn Coyne, have spent decades analyzing story, & genres: it's literally their careers. Truby's The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain The Way the World Work identifies 14 genres that each engage a "specific dimension" of the human experience and also identifies that these have to be dealt with.
The 14 genres that Western media stand on are:
- Horror, a genre centered on one's death and confronting the ghosts of the past, has a fundament concern of religious symbolism, the riposte to self-death. Therefore Horror & Religion are 2 sides of the "coin" of contemplating one's absolute death. All of Truby's genres feature at least one transcendent form. For Horror, these are the stories of religious narrative beats (featuring the examples A Christmas Carol and The Seventh Seal) and the Horror/Sci-Fi Epic (with the usual body horror examples of Frankenstein and EX_MACHINA).
- Action is the basis of whether one succeeds or not; therefore, inaction is the greatest crime, as it accommodates enemy determination of our outcome. Its transcendent forms include Sports, Heist, and War stories.
- Myth transforms from one's nature & meaning, through one's engaging, into one's society-owned legacy. Truby calls this the Life Process and references Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He contrasts a traditional "Male" Myth with the transcendent Female Myth, contrasting the action-oriented The Iliad and the cunning-oriented The Odyssey. He further contrasts the masculine elements of The Lord of the Rings with the feminine elements of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He also argues for the blended Myth/Sci-Fi Epic (which he also calls creation myths, like The Foundation Trilogy and Black Panther (2018)) and the (briefly discussed) Ecological Myth.
- Coming-of-Age/Bildungsroman & Memoir focuses on creating, or working-out, oneself through fiction or nonfiction. The fictional Coming-of-Age story and the nonfiction Memoir have two transcendent genres. The older version, what he calls the Myth/Drama, shifted from the grander epics of The Iliad and The Odyssey into more intimate and theatrical dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Its modern version is the Personal Myth like Hope and Glory and Forrest Gump.
- Science Fiction focuses on Science, Society, & Culture, through a description on their interactions and feedback loops. Its transcendent forms are the Sci-Fi/Myth Epic (like Dune, Arrival, and 2001: A Space Odyssey) and the Sci-Fi Horror Epic (or the dystopian genre).
- Crime primarily engages with Morality & Justice, implicitly in the social-legal-civil systems/machinery which either enforce, enable, or obstruct these. Its transcendent forms are the Epic Crime Tragedy (Crime and Punishment, The Usual Suspects, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) and the Crime Black Comedy (In Bruges, Breaking Bad, and Parasite (2019)).
- Comedy comments on Manners & Morals. Truby argues that "the drop" is the root of comedy, but other approaches exist. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Hofstadter, for example, identified that a root of humor is the moebius strip: being walked around a circle, then suddenly finding oneself upside-down, somehow. "Surprisingly violated expectations" is another root of humor, and humor/expectations are culture specific. "The drop" is just the American culture-specific core of Hollywood. Truby mentions other genres like the Farce, the French culture's core humor (also known as detailed absurdism). Other roots of humor include the English tradition of "structural/implications" absurdity. Its transcendent forms are the Black Comedy and the Satire.
- Western, concerned with the Rise & Fall of Civilization "in American-stylized microcosm", is Truby's finding of the Hollywood version of the genre. His finding that the Wild West village to be the archetypal village is U.S.-specific. Another argument includes that humankind's deep ancestry, the Tribal Mother Village, is the archetypal village, but Hollywood has no interest in those, and urban audiences won't identify with that reality. Its only transcendent form is the Anti-Western.
- Gangster features a broader incorporation of Corruption in business and politics. He argues that the foundation of this genre is composed of The Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar, and Scarface (1932). The copious examples of the transcendent forms distinguish the Gangster Epic (which track the process of national development, like The Godfather and A Prophet), the Eastern genre (which tracks not an actual gangster but an everyman, like The Great Gatsby, The Age of Innocence, and The Grapes of Wrath), and the Economic-Political Epic (like Heart of Darkness and I, Claudius).
- Fantasy concerns the Art of Living and transcends into the Social Fantasy, which takes three major forms: the Traveling Angel Fantasy (It's a Wonderful Life and Mary Poppins), the Paradise on Earth Fantasy (Pleasantville), and the Political Fantasy Epic (which ostensibly is just the Magic Realism genre like One Hundred Years of Solitude).
- Detective Story & Thriller (a genre with two version which Truby distinguishes, though he bizarrely never calls it the mystery genre) focus on the Mind & The Truth. It's been pointed-out that the detective story is control-centered fantasy, whereas the thriller is victim-centered fantasy. He offers two transcendent genres: the Cosmic Detective/Thriller (which investigates the complexity and meaning of life) and the "Story of the Mind and Truth" (which investigates the mechanisms of the mind and self-reflection, Inside Out-style).
- The Love Story focuses on the Art of Happiness through relationship, a positive-sum game where our relationship is greater in worth than the mere sum of two individuals' independent worth. His three transcendent genres are the Tragedy of Traditional Marriage (Anna Karenina and The Earrings of Madame de...), the Comedy of Remarriage (The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday), and True Love & the Art of Marriage (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Before Midnight, and The Thin Man movies).
Every genre has its own requirements that must be met, for the people who love that genre to have satisfaction in any story done in their territory. Truby & Coyne both did as much as they could to get this into everybody, so writers understand the genre, then surprise/delight its fans: this is successful story writing.
See also Works by Subject.
Universal genres:
Also see:
Sub-genres: (multiple media)
- Action Horror
- Actual Play
- Alternate History
- Analog Horror
- Bad Girl Comic
- Christian Fiction
- Cosmic Horror Story
- Criminal Procedural
- Coming of Age Story
- Costume Drama
- Conspiracy Thriller
- Cyberpunk
- The Epic
- Fable
- Fairy Tale
- Fantasy
- Film Noir
- Gangster Fiction
- Genius Thriller
- Gunpowder Fantasy: Fantasy fiction where black powder weapons have become widespread.
- Harem Genre
- Heroic Pet Story
- Historical Detective Fiction
- Historical Fiction: Fiction set in a distinctive historical period, different than the author's present.
- Jidaigeki
- Jungle Opera
- Magical Girl Genre
- Mecha Show
- Military and Warfare
- Military Science Fiction
- Mons Series
- New Queer Cinema
- New Weird
- Non-Fiction
- Police Procedural
- Professional Wrestling
- Psychological Thriller
- Psychosexual Horror: A horror subgenre that explores psychosexual development as a subject matter, including themes of sexual development and sexual activities.
- Queer Media
- Queer Romance
- Realistic Fiction
- Religious Edutainment
- Romantic Comedy
- Satire/Parody/Pastiche
- School Stories
- Science Fiction
- Sea Stories
- Sex Comedy
- Slipstream Genre
- Space Opera
- Speculative Fiction
- Spirit Cultivation Genre
- Sports Stories
- Superhero Stories
- True Crime
- The Western
- Wuxia
- Xenofiction