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Books are classified into genres based on criteria like tone, content, and setting. Fiction and non-fiction are the main categories, with sub-genres like comedy, romance, and biography. Scholars study how genres are defined and their societal implications, including gender relations.
A book genre is a particular class or type of book, separated according to certain criteria, such as tone, content, or setting. There are many different genres and sub-genres and the line between one and the other is not always very clear. Books can meet the criteria for several classes, in which case they are called intergenre works. There is also a field of study focusing on how and why works of literature are classified as they are.
Common book genres
Literary genres are generally divided into fiction and non-fiction. Common types of fiction include comedy, drama, history, romance, religious, fantasy, humor, mystery, science fiction; and common types of nonfiction include biography and autobiography, fiction, and speech. There are many sub-classifications, including such things as satire and comedy of manners within comedy; historical novels and family sagas in history; and hard and soft science fiction. Some books are cross-genre, meaning they contain essential elements from several distinct categories, such as space westerns, which are usually set in space but contain elements from classic American westerns, such as cowboys.
Categorization criteria
Books are usually classified according to their tone and the focus of their content. For example, a play that has a light, comedic tone and centers on a female lead who finds a boyfriend would likely be a romantic comedy, while one that is more serious and chronicles the lives of family members during World War II it could be a family saga or a war novel, and a collection of letters written by a historical figure in his lifetime would be an epistolary autobiography. Some book genres also have specific character types associated with them, such as knights in medieval fiction or cynical detectives in hard-boiled mysteries. A play’s setting can also play a role if it is distinctive, such as 17th-century England or the American West in the mid-17th century.
gender studies
Literary scholars often study book genres to try to determine why literary works are classified in this way and how this division is made – for example, the minimum criteria that must be met to definitively state that a work it falls into one genre instead of another. They also discuss which classifications are pure and which are mixed, and how the different relate to each other. Some take a more societal approach and look at whether genres reflect existing social hierarchies and the effects on class, race, or gender relations of categorizing books in a specific way.
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