Epic genres of literature. Examples and features of the epic genre
In all forms of art there are historically established internal divisions, large ones are species, and these smaller genres are these types.
Literary Views
All literature is divided into the following types - lyrics, epic and drama.
The lyrics got its name from a musical instrument - lyre. In antiquity, the game was accompanied by reading poems. A classic example is Orpheus.
The epic (from the Greek epos - narrative) is the second kind. And all that is included in it, is called epic genres.
Drama (from the Greek drama) is the third kind.
Even in ancient times, Plato and Aristotle attempted to separate the literature by birth. Belinsky justified this division scientifically.
Recently, it was formed andA separate (fourth) kind of literature is the totality of certain independent works. These are lyric-epic genres. From the title it follows that the epic genre absorbed and transformed into itself the individual components of the lyric genre.
Examples of the artistic epic
The epos itself is divided into folk and authorial. And the folk epic was the forerunner of the author's epos. Such examples of epic genres as novel, epic, novel, story, essay, novella, fairy tale and poem, ode and fantasy in aggregate represent the whole array of fiction.
In all epic genres, the type of narration canbe different. Depending on whose person is described - the author (the story is from a third person) or a personified character (the story is from the first person), or on behalf of a particular narrator. When the description is from the first person, there are also possible variants - the narrator can be one, there may be several of them or it can be a conditional narrator who did not take part in the described events.
Characteristic features of these genres
If the narration is from a third party, thenassumes some detachment, contemplation in the description of events. If from the first or several persons, then there are several different views on the interpreted events and personal interest of the characters (such works are called author's).
Characteristic features of the epic genre areplot (assuming a succession of events), time (in the epic genre, it assumes the existence of a certain distance between the described events and the time of description) and space. The three-dimensionality of space is confirmed by the description of portraits of heroes, interiors and landscapes.
Features of the epic genre characterizethe latter's ability to include elements like lyricism (lyrical digressions) and drama (monologues, dialogues). Epic genres seem to echo each other.
Forms of epic genres
In addition, there are three structural formsepic - large, medium and small. Some literary scholars omit the average form, relating the story to a large one, which includes a novel and an epic. There is a notion of a novel-epic. They differ from each other in the form of narration and plot. Depending on the questions put on consideration in the novel, it can concern historical, fantastic, adventurous, psychological, utopian and social. And these are also features of the epic genre. The number and globality of topics and questions, answers to which this literary form can give, enabled Belinsky to compare the novel with the epos of private life.
The medium form belongs to the story, and the story,novella, sketch, fairy tale, parable and even an anecdote make up a small epic form. That is, the main epic genres are a novel, a story and a story that literary criticism characterizes as, respectively, "a chapter, a leaflet and a line from the book of life."
Representatives of a large form of genres
Along with the above, such epicgenres like a poem, short story, a fairy tale, an essay, have their own characteristic features, which give the reader an idea of a certain content. All epic genres of literature are born, reach a peak of perfection and die. Now there are rumors about the death of the novel.
Such representatives of the epic genres of largeforms like a novel, epic or novel-epic speak about the scale of the displayed events, representing both the national interest and the life of an individual against the background of these events.
Epic is a monumentala work whose theme always becomes problems and phenomena of national importance. A vivid representative of this genre is the novel "War and Peace" by L. Tolstoy.
Components of epic genres
The very term "novel" came from the name of the language,which published the first printed works - Romance (Rome or Roma, where the works were published in Latin). Features of the novel can be very much - genre, compositional, artistic and stylistic, linguistic and plot. And each of them gives the right to refer the work to a specific group. There is a social novel, moralizing, cultural-historical, psychological, adventure, experimental. There is an adventure novel, there is English, French, Russian. Basically, the novel is a large, artistic, often prose work, written according to certain canons and rules.
The average form of an artistic epic
Features of the ethical genre of "story"are not only in the volume of the work, although it is called a "small romance." There are far fewer incidents in the story. Most often it is devoted to one central event.
The story is a prose little piecenarrative character, describing a particular case of life. From the fairy tale he differs realism of color. According to some literary critics, the story can be called a work in which there is a unity of time, action, events, places and character. This all indicates that the story, as a rule, describes one episode that occurs with one hero at a particular time. There are no clearly defined definitions of this genre. Therefore, many believe that the story - this is the Russian name of the novel, which was first mentioned in Western literature in the XIII century and represented a small genre sketch.
As a literary genre, the novel was approved by Boccaccio inXIV century. This suggests that the novel is much older than the story by age. Even A. Pushkin and N. Gogol, some stories were attributed to the stories. That is, a more or less clear concept, which determines what a "story" is, arose in Russian literature in the eighteenth century. But there are no clear boundaries between the story and the novel, except that the latter at its very beginning was more like an anecdote, that is, a short funny life sketch. Some of the features inherent in it in the Middle Ages, the novel preserved to this day.
Representatives of a small form of artistic epic
The story is often confused with an essay for the same reasons- The lack of a clear formulation, which presupposes the existence of rules for writing. Moreover, they arose almost simultaneously. A sketch is a short description of a single phenomenon. In our time it is more a documentary story about a real event. In the name itself there is an indication of brevity - outline. Most often, essays are published in periodicals - newspapers and magazines.
Because of the mass nature of the phenomenon, it should be noted thatgenre as "fantasy", gaining popularity recently. He appeared in the 20s of the last century in America. Its ancestor is Lovecraft. Fantasy is a kind of fantasy genre that does not have any scientific binding and completely consists of fiction.
Representatives of "lyrical prose"
As noted above, to three literary genera inour time was added to the fourth, representing the lyric-epic genres of literature that separated themselves into an independent group, like a poem, a ballad, a song. Features of this literary genus consist in combining the storyline with a description of the experiences of the narrator (the so-called lyric "I"). In the title of this kind lies its essence - the unification of the elements of the lyric and epos into one. Such combinations have been encountered in literature since antiquity, but these works were separated into an independent group at a time when interest in the personality of the narrator was sharply manifested in the era of sentimentalism and romanticism. Lyrical epic genres are sometimes called "lyrical prose."
All kinds, genres and other literary units, complementing each other, ensure the existence and continuity of the literary process.
