Horror story Humour story Autobiography

A. Similar to fairy tales and legends, these stories appeal to a reader’s romantic fantasies. In highly emotional, overblown language, they tell of love and adventure. Escapist in nature, such stories free readers from the concerns of everyday life, painting an idealized picture of human relationships.

B. This story genre presents fictitious characters interlinked with actual events and figures of history. Historical characters are portrayed speaking in first person as though an actual record exists of the event. Whatever their chronology, the characters of fiction of this type speak in the idiom of the author, not of their day.

C. This genre features the stories and mythology of the American frontier of the nineteenth century. Typical heroes are tough, self-reliant men with a love for the land. Native Americans are often an important presence in the story. Like its typical hero, its language is unadorned, with the dialogue often in dialect.

D. Stories of this type present a puzzle in the form of a mystery that must be solved. The main character (generally a detective) — and vicariously the reader — conduct a search for clues. Protagonists are presented as tough, honest individuals, ruthless but in pursuit of the social good. The language of “hard-boiled” fiction of this genre is streetwise and direct.

E. Derived from the detective story, the hero of this genre is a modern fantasy figure. Rebellious against authority or guilt-ridden from his deceptions, he symbolizes the amorality of modern society. Writers of thrillers of such kind go into great detail in their descriptions of procedures, events and tools of the trade, which is a very effective way of arresting and keeping up the reader’s interest.

F. The basic themes of this popular kind of imaginative literature include space travel, time travel and marvellous discoveries and inventions. Stories of this type may be set in the future or in the past; some are set in a far-away universe. Unlike fantasy, which deals with the impossible, this type of fiction describes events that could actually occur, according to accepted or possible theories. Popularity of the genre grew as developments in nuclear energy and space exploration showed that many of its predictions were more realistic than many people believed them to be.

G. This is a personal history, usually informal in style, in which the writer tells of persons known and things done sharing one’s own thoughts and emotions with the reader.

H. Such stories induce smiles or outright laughter. They may be gentle, silly, or sarcastic. In them, writers draw upon real concerns or contemporary issues, but through irony, exaggeration, and satire, they make the serious funny.

I. Melodramatic and containing mysterious and supernatural events, these stories aim at frightening their readers. Set in a gloomy, forbidding location, suspense is heightened by overblown descriptions, unaccountable sounds, darkness, and premonitions of death. Today this genre represents characters who fail to understand important clues and take on investigations that only get them into trouble — or worse.