fable a narrative not founded on fact, and intended to convey a lesson. Aesop, La Fontaine, James Thurber ( Fables for our Time ). See John Vernon Lord lecture on The Fox and the Crow.
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales . "History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the contrary, is the recital of facts represented as a fiction. " Denis Diderot, definition of History in L'Encyclopaedie , c1771

fabliaux a short metrical tale usually found in French poetry but also Chaucer, Canterbury Tales .
folk narrative ; recent examples by Angela Carter and J.L.Borges; see Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore .

folk legend Katherine Briggs, British Folk Tales and Legends Paladin London 1977.

nursery rhyme the modern English poet ,Charles Causley. Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes . Dylan Thomas wrote, "The words Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross were as haunting to me, who did not know then what a cock-horse was nor cared a damn where Banbury Cross might be,as, much later, were such lines as John Donne's "Go catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, " which I could not understand when I first read them." (Scully)

parable the inclusion of a moral or spiritual truth in a fictitious narrative. In Christian lore, The New Testament .

proverb a short pithy saying in common use

epigram a short poem ending in a witty or pointed conclusion. Martial. Grigson, The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs

epitaph a brief piece of writing on the death of someone.

motto a short and pithy maxim usually inscribed on an object or contained in a cracker.

emblem emblem books were particularly popular in Britain between 1580 and 1640 ie Geoffrey Whitney A Choice of Emblemes , 1586 usually an image but sometimes attached to a motto or parable to encapsulate a moral

description Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style . being 195 ways of describing the one meaningless incident.

allegory describing something under the guise of something else ie John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress . Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queen . "it was the vice of those times to affect superstitiously the Allegory; and nothing would then be current without a mystic meaning..." Rymer about Spencer 1674

myth - epic - saga A fictional narrative often involving supernatural persons to embody some idea, usually associated with natural or historical phenomena. Epics are usually associated with verse form. Dante. The Divine Comedy . Beowolf, an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem. The Odyssey .The Iliad .

novel - novelette Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote ; Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy .

the picaresque a piece of writing film in the form of a journey.

epistolary novel A novel written as a collection of letters. Laclos, Les Liasions Dangeureuses .

the short story A restricted narrative in prose form. The Caribbean writer Olive Senior, Summer Lightning . We've made a group analysis of James Joyce, The Dead from Dubliners . Filmed by John Huston. Kay Boyle's short stories for The New Yorker . Kathleen Mansfield and John Cheever. The Irish writer Frank O'Connor.

parody writing intended to mimic another for the puposes of ridicule. The poetry of Wendy Cope. Max Beerbohm, and unconscious self-parodies, see Dwight McDonald, Parodies , Faber & Faber 1960. In his Daydream College for Bards , W.H.Auden forsaw, " The Library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of paradies." (Scully)

satire a piece of writing intended to make something or someone look ridiculous. Rabelais and the Carnivalesque. aphorism and enigmaByron and Pope. See also allegory and fable.

pastiche a design (words or images) made up from fragments pieced together in emulation of another person or style. Pasticcio, from Latin pasticium = paste.

poem - verse an arrangement of words/lines in an intended order and rhythm. On the course we look at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, The Disquieting Muses , from Collected Poems; and Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream, from Collected Poems . Stevens saw poetry as "a pheasant disappearing into the brush." (Scully)

haiku a Japanese verse form of 17 syllables often arranged 5, 7, and 5. Find work by Basho.

sonnet a piece of verse usually expressing one main idea, of fourteen lines, each being typically an iambic pentameter of ten syllables ie John Donne, Songs and Sonets 1635.

limerick a five line verse form (aabba) always used for comic purposes. The limerick was made an acceptable verse form by Edward Lear although it had been used in children's books as earl;y as 1710.

ballad a light simple song, often narrative.A Book of Ballads, Chatto and Windus, London 1938, Zodiac Book The French cabaret tradition, Jacques Brel.Brecht's cabaret songs.

song a musical setting of words, Shakespeare, The Tempest, Twelfth Night etc.

clerihew a four line nonsense biography of a living or historical figure, a literary genre by the writer Eric Clerihew Bentley while at school and first published in Biography for Beginners . An example, "It was a pity about Dickens/ Insane jealousy of chickens,/ And one could almost really weep/ At his morbid mistrust of sheep." from E.C.B. More Biography.

playscript the words from which actors read before performance.

libretto the text of an opera, ie. Schikaneder's libretto to Mozart's The Magic Flute .

monologue where a person speaks to him or herself, ie Alan Bennett, Talking Heads. description setting forth in words the major characteristics of something or someone. See also Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style .

faction Truman Capote, In Cold Blood . Thomas Kenneally, Schindler's Ark .

scenario the sketch of the plot of a play and, more usually, a film.

film script Graham Greene, The Third Man , see the film and read the novel. David Mamet, The House of Games . Peter Greenaway, Drowning by Numbers and Prospero's Books .

diary - journal a daily record of events travel or transactions;in fictional form, see Max Brod,ed., The Diaries of Franz Kafka , Penguin 1975, December 25th 1915,p.353, "Open the diary only in order to lull myself to sleep. But see what happens to be the last entry and could conceive of thousands of identical ones I might have entered over the past three or four years. I wear myself out to no purpose, should be happy if I could write, but I don't."

confession The Confessions of Saint Augustine - but also can be a fictional account of a person's faults.