An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article about the Kentucky Derby by Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized the style. It is an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire. It has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. This way of thinking and criticizing works can be said to have changed the way literary texts are viewed and studied, as well as changing and expanding the canon of what is commonly taught. It is used a lot in Greek myths.
Speculative fiction is an umbrella genre of fiction that encompasses all the subgenres that depart from realism, or strictly imitating everyday reality, instead presenting fantastical, supernatural, futuristic, or other imaginative realms. This catch-all genre includes, but is not limited to, science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, magical realism, superhero fiction, alternate history, utopia and dystopia, fairy tales, steampunk, cyberpunk, weird fiction, and some apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. The term has been used for works of literature, film, television, drama, video games, radio, and their hybrids.
Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other non-fiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, the journalist is "invisible"; facts are meant to be reported objectively.
"The Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes' essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work to Text".
Narrative journalism, also referred to as literary journalism, is defined as creative nonfiction that contains accurate, well-researched information. It is related to immersion journalism, where a writer follows a subject or theme for a long period of time and details an individual's experiences from a deeply personal perspective.
A vignette is a French loanword expressing a short and descriptive piece of writing that captures a brief period in time. Vignettes are more focused on vivid imagery and meaning rather than plot. Vignettes can be stand-alone, but they are more commonly part of a larger narrative, such as vignettes found in novels or collections of short stories.
The rhetorical modes are a broad traditional classification of the major kinds of formal and academic writing by their rhetorical (persuasive) purpose: narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. First attempted by Samuel P. Newman in A Practical System of Rhetoric in 1827, the modes of discourse have long influenced US writing instruction and particularly the design of mass-market writing assessments, despite critiques of the explanatory power of these classifications for non-school writing.
The non-fiction novel is a literary genre that, broadly speaking, depicts non-fictional elements, such as real historical figures and actual events, woven together with fictitious conversations and uses the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely defined and flexible genre. The genre is sometimes referred to using the slang term "faction", a portmanteau of the words fact and fiction.
In literature and other artistic media, a mode is an unspecific critical term usually designating a broad but identifiable kind of literary method, mood, or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular form or genre. Examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic.
"Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" is an essay by Tom Wolfe that appeared in the November 1989 issue of Harper's Magazine criticizing the American literary establishment for retreating from realism.
Stephen Muecke BA, Mes.L (Paris), PhD (UWA) FAHA is Emeritus Professor of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, Australia and Adjunct Professor at the Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Broome. He studied linguistics and semiotics, completing his PhD on storytelling techniques among Aboriginal people in Broome, Western Australia.
Quantum fiction is a genre of speculative fiction that reflects modern experience of the material world and reality as influenced by quantum theory and new principles in quantum physics. It is characterized by the use of an element in quantum mechanics as a storytelling device. The genre is not necessarily science-themed, and blurs the line separating science fiction and fantasy into a broad scope of mainstream literature that transcends the mechanical model of science and involves the fantasy of human perception or imagination as realistic components affecting the everyday physical world.
A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work.
The encyclopedic novel is a literary concept popularised by Edward Mendelson in two 1976 essays referring to a work of fiction with an exhaustive, encyclopedia-like scope and writing style. In Mendelson's formulation, encyclopedic novels "attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge". In more general terms, the encyclopedic novel is a long, complex work of fiction that incorporates extensive information, often from specialized disciplines of science and the humanities. Mendelson's essays examine the encyclopedic tendency in the history of literature, considering the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Faust, Moby-Dick, and War and Peace, with an emphasis on the modern Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. Commonly cited examples of encyclopedic novels in the postmodern period include, in addition to Pynchon, Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations (1991), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). Other literary critics have explored the concept since, attempting to understand the function and effect of "encyclopedic" narratives, and coining the related terms systems novel and maximalist novel.
Elizabeth Abel is an American literary scholar, professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Abel was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. In 1981 she was guest editor for a special issue of Critical Inquiry, 'Writing and Sexual Difference'. The essays marked a shift in feminist literary theory from "recovering a lost tradition to discovering the terms of confrontation with the dominant tradition", by means of "specific historical studies of the ways women revise prevailing themes and styles". Abel's Virginia Woolf and the fictions of psychoanalysis related Virginia Woolf's work to 1920s social anthropology and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.
