Literature is a beautiful expression of human experiences in words”.

It reflects the highest point of a

particular language’s verbal output which may be written down or transferred orally from one
generation to the next.

Why literature is important?

1. It saves our time – Of course it looks like it is wasting our time but literature is ultimately the
greatest time saver because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take
you years, decade, millenniums to directly experience.
a. It is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more
situations than we can ever directly witness. It lets you safely see what it’s like to get
divorced or kill someone and feel remorseful or chucking your job and take off to the desert
and make a terrible mistake while leading your country.
b. It let you speed up time. In order to see the archival time from childhood to old age.
c. It gives to you the keys to the palaces and countless bedrooms – so you can assess your
life in relation to that of others.
d. It introduces you to fascinating people – From Roman generals, an eleven century
French princess, a Russian upper class mother just embarking on an affair.
e. It takes you across continents and centuries.

2. It makes you nicer person – Literature performs the basic magic of showing us what things
look like from someone else’s point of view. It allows us to consider the consequences of our
actions on others in a way we otherwise wouldn’t. It shows us examples of kindly, generous,
sympathetic people. Literature typically stands opposed to the dominant value system the one that
rewards money or power. Writers are only other side. They make us sympathetic to ideas and
feelings that have deep importance but which can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status
conscious and cynical world. Literature cures you of provincialism and at almost no cost it turns us
into citizens of the world.

3. It is a cure for loneliness – We are weirder than we are allowed to admit. We often can’t say
what’s really on our minds but in books we find descriptions of who we genuinely are and what
events are actually like – described with an honesty quite different from our ordinary conversation
allows for. In the best books, it is as if the writer knows us better than we know ourselves. They find
the word to describe the fragile, real, special experiences of our inner lives – the light on a summer
morning, the anxiety we felt at gathering, the sensations of the first kiss, the envy that we felt when
a friend told us of a new business, the longing we experience in training looking at the profile of
another passenger we never dare to speak to. Writers open our hearts and minds and give us maps
to our own selves so that we can travel more reliably and less of the feeling of paranoia and
persecution. As a writer Emerson remarked in the works of great writers we find our own neglected
thoughts. Literature is a corrective to the superficiality and compromises of friendship. Book are our
true friends always to have never too busy giving us unvarnished accounts of what things are really
like.

4. It prepares you for failures – all our lives one of ours greatest fear is a failing or messing up or
becoming as a tabloid put it a loser. Every day the media takes us into stories of failure.
Interestingly a lot of literature is also about failure. In one way or the other, a great many novels,
plays and poems are about people who messed up, people who slept with mum by mistake, who let
 down their partner, who died after running up some debt on shopping sprees. If media got to them
they make mincemeat out of them. But great books don’t judge as harshly or as one dimensionally
as the media. They hold pity for their hero or fear for ourselves based on a new sense of how near
we all are to destroy our own lives. But if literature can really do all these things we might need to
treat it a little differently than we do right now. We tend to treat it as a distraction, an
entertainment and something for the beach. But it is far more than that. It is really a therapy in the
broad sense. We should learn to treat them as doctors treat their medicines – something we
prescribe to a range of ailments and classified according to the problem it best be suited to
addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others because it is a tool that
helps us live and die with little more wisdom, goodness and sanity.

What are common literary genres?

There are four main literary genres: (1) Drama (2) Fiction (3) Non-Fiction (4) Poetry

(1) Drama: In general any work meant to be performed on a stage by actors. A drama is the
portrayal of fictional or non-fictional events. Dramas are typically called plays, and their
creators are known as “playwrights” or “dramatists.” The two iconic masks of drama—the
laughing face and the crying face—are the symbols of two of the ancient Greek Muses:
Thalia, the Muse of comedy and Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy.

The sub-genres of drama are as follows:

(a) Comedy: Lighter in tone, comedies are intended to make the audience laugh and
usually come to a happy ending. Comedies place offbeat characters in unusual
situations causing them to do and say funny things. Comedy can also be sarcastic in
nature, poking fun at serious topics. There are also several sub-genres of comedy,
including romantic comedy, sentimental comedy, a comedy of manners, and tragic
comedy—plays in which the characters take on tragedy with humor in bringing serious
situations to happy endings.
(2) Tragedy: Based on darker themes, tragedies portray serious subjects like death,
disaster, and human suffering in a dignified and thought-provoking way. Rarely
enjoying happy endings, characters in tragedies, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, are often
burdened by tragic character flaws that ultimately lead to their demise.
(3) Farce: Featuring exaggerated or absurd forms of comedy, a farce is a nonsensical
genre of drama in which characters intentionally overact and engage in slapstick or
physical humor.
(4) Melodrama: An exaggerated form of drama, melodramas depict classic one-
dimensional characters such as heroes, heroines, and villains dealing with sensational,
romantic, and often perilous situations.
(5) Opera: This versatile genre of drama combines theater, dialogue, music, and
dance to tell grand stories of tragedy or comedy. Since characters express their
feelings and intentions through song rather than dialogue, performers must be both
skilled actors and singers.
(6) Docudrama: A relatively new genre, docudramas are dramatic portrayals of
historic events or non-fictional situations. More often presented in movies and
television than in live theater, popular examples of docudramas include the movies
Apollo 13 and 12 Years a Slave, based on the autobiography written by Solomon
Northup.
 (2) Fiction: Fiction is a made up story. Its sub genres are:

(a) Folklore: For the most part, folk literature (or folklore) is the creation of primitive and
illiterate people - and therefore much of it belongs to oral tradition. It becomes literature in
the correct sense of the word only when people gather it together and write it down. When
this happens, it is usually a sign that the folk literature in question is in decline

Folklore’s suqb genres include (i) fairy tales (ii) fables (iii) myths (iv) legends (v) tall stories

(i) Fairy tale belongs to folk literature and is part of the oral tradition. And yet
no one bothered to record them until the brothers Grimm produced their famous
collection of Kinder- und Haasmiirchen or Household Tales (1812, 1814, 1822). In its
written form the fairy tale tends to be a narrative in prose about the fortunes and
misfortunes of a hero or heroine who, having experienced various adventures of a
more or less supernatural kind, lives happily ever after. Magic, charms, disguise and
spells are some of the major ingredients of such stories, which are often subtle in
their interpretation of human nature and psychology

(ii) Fable is a short narrative in prose or verse which points a moral. Non-
human creatures or inanimate things are normally the characters. The presentation
of human beings as animals is the characteristic of the literary fable and is unlike
the fable that still flourishes among primitive peoples. The genre probably arose in
Greece, and the first collection of fables is ascribed to Aesop (6th c. BC).

(iii) In general a myth is a story which is not 'true' and which involves (as a
rule) supernatural beings - or at any rare supra-human beings. Myth is always
concerned with creation. Myth explains how something came to exist. Myth
embodies feeling and concept - hence the Promethean or Herculean figure, or the
idea of Diana, or the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Many myths or quasi-myths are
primitive explanations of the natural order and cosmic forces.

(iv) Legend is a story or narrative which lies somewhere between myth and
historical fact and which, as a rule, is about a particular figure or person. Famous
examples are Faust, Hamlet, Beowulf, King Arthur, Charlemagne, Robin Hood etc.
Any popular folk heroes (or heroines)revolutionaries, saints or warriors are likely to
have legends develop about them; stories which often grow taller and longer with
time and which may eventually be written down or recited in song, verse and
ballad, through which means the oral tradition is sustained

(v) Tall story is a story which is extravagant, outlandish or highly improbable.

Usually regarded as false, however good it may be. They are of the same family as
fantasy and fairy tale. The epic tradition, and especially the primary epic, contains a
good many episodes which are classifiable as tall stories. They abound in legend and
hagiography. Often enough the 'traveller's tale' is virtually the same as a tall story.

(b) Novel: The term now applies to a wide variety of writings whose only common attribute is
that they are extended pieces of prose fiction. But 'extended' begs a number of questions. The
length of novels varies greatly and there has been much debate on how long a novel is or should
be - to the reductio ad absurdum of when is a novel not a novel or a long short story or a short
novel or a novella. There seem to be fewer and fewer rules, but it would probably be generally
agreed that, in contemporary practice, a novel will be between 6o-7o,ooo words and, say,
200,000.

(a) Realistic fiction

(b) Mystery
(c) Historical fiction
(d) Romance
(e) Science fiction
(f) Thriller
(g) Horror fiction
(h) Detective story

(2) Non-fiction: Opposed to fiction which is a made-up story, nonfiction is a type

of literature that deals with facts or actual people and events.

(a) Biography
(b) Autobiography
(c) Books of history

(4) Poetry: It is a comprehensive term which can be taken to cover any kind of metrical
composition.

a) Ode: (Gk 'song') A lyric poem, usually of some length. The main features are an
elaborate stanza-structure, a marked formality and stateliness in tone and style (which
make it ceremonious), and lofty sentiments and thoughts. In short, an ode is rather a
grand poem; a full-dress poem.

b) Epic: An epic is a long narrative poem, on a grand scale, about the deeds - of
warriors and heroes. It is a polygonal, 'heroic' story incorporating myth, legend, folk tale
and history. Epics are often of national significance in the sense that they embody the
history and aspirations of a nation in a lofty or grandiose manner

c) Sonnet: The ordinary sonnet consists of fourteen lines, usually in iambic

pentameters with considerable variations in rhyme scheme. The three basic sonnet
forms are: (a) the Petrarchan (b) the Spenserian (c) the Shakespearean sonnets.

d) Elegy: An elegy has come to mean a poem of mourning for an individual, or a

lament for some tragic event.

e) Ballad: Fundamentally a ballad is a song that tells a story and originally was a
musical accompaniment to a dance. We can distinguish certain basic characteristics
common to large numbers of ballads: (a) the beginning is often abrupt; (b) the language
is simple; (c) the story is told through dialogue and action; (d) the theme is often tragic
(though there are a number of comic ballads); (e) there is often a refrain.