#literary forms

[darkspicyevanstan]

⚡️ Literary Forms ⚡️

View the Literary Forms below the cut!

Cozy Mystery

Crime Fiction

Epistolary Fiction

Ergodic Fiction

Fantasy Fiction

Arthurian Legend

Dark Fantasy

Contemporary Fantasy

Epic Fantasy

Fantasy Romance

Grimdark

High Fantasy

Historical Fantasy

Low Fantasy

Portal Fantasy

Romantic Fantasy

Romantasy

Science Fantasy

Sword and Sorcery

Urban Fantasy

Feghoot

Gothic Fiction

Contemporary Gothic

Dark Academia

Gothic Fantasy

Gothic Horror

Gothicpunk

Gothic Romance

Gothic Surrealism

Midwestern Gothic

Southern Gothic

Urban Gothic

Historical 

Creation Fiction

Ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Rome

Medieval Era

Renaissance Era

Victorian Era

Age of Sail

Regency

1600s

1700s

1800s

1920s

1930s

1940s

World War I

World War II

Vietnam War

Cold War

Western

Horror

Alien Horror

Camp

Comedy Horror

Cosmic Horror

Creature Horror

Eldritch Horror

Erotic Horror

Fantasy Horror

Found Footage

Lovecraftian

Monster

Paranormal Horror

Parasitic Horror

Psychological

Slasher

Supernatural Horror

Urban Horror/Legend

Punk Fiction

Aetherpunk (Magic Punk)

Apunkalypse

Anthropunk (Furpunk)

Atompunk

Biopunk

Bitpunk

Bronzepunk

Castlepunk

Cattlepunk

Clockpunk

Cyberpunk

Decopunk

Desertpunk

Dieselpunk

Dreadpunk

Dungeonpunk

Elfpunk

Flowerpunk

Formicapunk (Casette Futurism/Modem Punk)

Hopepunk

Lunarpunk

Nanopunk

Oceanpunk/Piratepunk

Solarpunk

Silkpunk

Steampunk

Stonepunk

Tidalpunk

Satire

Speculative Fiction

Alternate History

Apocalyptic Fiction

Avant-Garde Fiction

Bangsian

Bizarro Fiction

Climate Fiction

Dystopian Fiction

Magical Realism

Post Apocalyptic

Science Fiction

Slipstream

Space Opera

Supernatural Fiction

Utopian Fiction

Weird Fiction

Thriller Fiction

[hawnks]

Anyway… at one point you read something and you loved it so much it made you want to write. That love is still inside you. You can love like that again, if you try.

[anachronistic-cat]

I think everyone needs to be at least a little obsessed with some old piece of literature that nobody else around you cares about. It's good for you.

[saysthenightingale]

if i ever start talking about making warhammer ocs. start hitting me and snap me out of it because that is when you know i am too far gone . I can’t be allowed to do this

[thirdity]

What all the culture critics who descend from Hegel and Marx have been unwilling to admit is the notion of art as autonomous (not merely historically interpretable) form. And since the peculiar spirit which animates the modern movements in the arts is based on, precisely, the rediscovery of the power (including the emotional power) of the formal properties of art, these critics are poorly situated to come to sympathetic terms with modern works of art, except through their “content.” Even form is viewed by the historicist critics as a kind of content.

Susan Sontag, "The Literary Criticism of Georg Lukács"

[cpcposting]

Probably one of my fave things about CPC is the fact that Gwen genuinely isn’t conventionally attractive, she’s not just some girl who *gasp* wears glasses and has her hair in a ponytail or something X_X The amount of ”””ugly””” characters I’ve that seen that fall into that trope bruhhh. But as the comic goes on, like Frederick, you get used to her appearance and come to appreciate her as truly beautiful bc of who she is <3 

[deadpanwalking]

hello!! do you have any recommendations for books or essays about becoming a better reader of poetry? I love the poems you post and esp love when your tags go into what you got out of it / understood from it, bc it’s always so much more than I was able to interpret on my own. and I want to become a better reader and learn how to really sit with a poem and get into all its layers but idk where to start.

I stand behind the recs in this post, but since you want to focus on poetry and poetics, in addition to William Empson's The Seven Types of Ambiguity and Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, and Poetry, I'd also recommend Christopher Ricks' The Force of Poetry, I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism, and Jorge Luis Borges' The Craft of Verse. They are all beautifully written, by people whose love of the form transcends academia and becomes, at times, a kind of secular worship. I loved poetry before I fully understood language, back when it was just incomprehensible mouthwords my parents repeated to get me to sleep; I'd have loved poetry even if I never toiled a day in the hermeneutics mines, like my grandmother reciting Eugene Onegin after her dementia cleared everything else from the table—she wasn't sure what it meant, all she knew was that this was the nicest thing she had. Isn't that a kind of faith?

There are other good books about how to read poetry, but these were the ones that initiated me into a conspiracy of words, they taught me to be curious about why I liked a poem, how to take pleasure in its vivisection without worrying I'd kill that faith—like martyrs, good poems never fall apart when you open them up, they yield. If anything, the practice of explication has made me even more of a fanatic. I hope it does the same for you!

If there are poets you already like, I can get more specific about recs—I'm partial to modernist poetry, but that just means I like following breadcrumb trails of allusions to lots of different literary traditions and can tell you where the bodies, hatchets and/or treasures are buried.

[firestorm09890]

Hell Screen

narrator: Yoshihide was an artist that everyone hated and who was an awful person, but his daughter was kind and sweet and everyone loved her so we all kinda tolerated her dad

Yoshihide: I would do anything for my daughter, Yuzuki. I can't paint something unless I've seen it with my eyes.

Yuzuki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_piety

Lord Horikawa: You've painted some nice art for me. I'll do literally any favor for you now.

Yoshihide: Can you release my daughter from your service

Lord Horikawa: no. fuck you

narrator: he wasn't in love with her or anything, he just felt bad that Yoshihide was her only family.

Lord Horikawa: Also I'm commissioning a massive scene of the Buddhist Hell, artist who can't paint something without having seen it

Yoshihide: ok

[various agonies of Yoshihide's apprentices]

[psychological agonies of Yoshihide also]

Yuzuki: [is seen growing unhappier and more stressed as the days go by]

narrator: people are saying Lord Horikawa's forcing himself upon her. this is false because he is too cool. this is Yoshihide's fault

[incident in which the narrator encounters Yuzuki fleeing from what was clearly assault]

narrator: yeah

Yoshihide: I'm almost done with the painting. I just need to see a maiden burn in a carriage so I can paint it

Lord Horikawa: okay [puts Yuzuki in a carriage and burns it]

narrator: stop saying it's because she didn't reciprocate his love it was clearly to punish Yoshihide for being so fucked up. I know this is true because Lord Horikawa said so

-- End --

[felixravinstills]

fun(?) fact: the first time (like 3-4 years ago) I really got cannibalism was when I read a short fanfiction about a man cannibalizing his stillborn son... I understood then... the potential...

(previous to this, I also shadowed a fandom with a subsection of people that thought cannibalism was really boring, so weirdly, I think I went on the opposite journey that most people have with the topic... I was afraid I was going to get called shallow and boring for when I first was like hey! cannibalism is kinda fun to explore!)

[jctko]

no one cares but a character dying is not the same as a character haunting the narrative. dying is a plot point, while haunting must be structural redefinition of the entire piece's form. it's why haunting of hill house begins and ends with the same line. it's why cassandra tells the audience of the oresteia exactly what is going to happen. they are defined by their endings- something that not all deaths lead to

[mswyrr]

This quote is (sadly) often relevant in fandom rn:

"Romance reading, Radway opines, “gives the reader a strategy for making her present situation more comfortable without substantive reordering of its structure rather than a comprehensive program for reorganizing her life in such a way that all needs might be met” (215, emphasis added). This statement rests on the assumption that literature can provide a “comprehensive program for reorganizing” the life of the reader. To take this assumption literally, we must imagine a novel providing, through its form or through its content, a “program” for reorganizing readers’ lives. Has any book ever done this? Certain novels of ideas come to mind as possible candidates. Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed mightily to the abolition of slavery. 1984 remains a strong argument against totalitarianism. Certain books with charismatic protagonists inspire readers to pursue certain professions. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has sent some of its readers to law school. James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small has undoubtedly inspired some of its readers to become veterinarians. Any number of books motivate readers to become teachers. But none of these books can be said to lay out a comprehensive program. Radway’s criticism of the romance novel is a criticism of its form: the ending is the culprit. Can the form of a novel accomplish, or, as Radway claims, thwart, a “comprehensive program for reorganizing” the reader’s life? Of course not. Literary forms do not have this power. Readers are free to ignore, skip, stop, disbelieve, dislike, reject, and otherwise read quite independently of the form. Readers of a given genre often read with another genre in mind. Female readers have done this for generations."

--Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel (pp. 12-13). University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

[vaguely-concerned]

just going about my day idly contemplating how some of the ways hawke can interact with a romanced anders are not at all unlike how they interact with leandra (and a bit of carver too, especially with a purple hawke), and then thought about my hawke in the timeline where he romances anders and was hit straight in the face with 'was he ever actually in love, or was he just desperately trying to renegotiate with his mother's ghost in any way he could' and now i need to lie down. this is the power of dragon age 2

[solipseismic]

DOES ANYONE HERE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT FINITE VS NON-FINITE VERBS IN WELSH

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

The drawback to reading books recommended by your coworkers is that sometimes the thing they're excited about is actually garbage. And then you gotta keep your writer-brained critiques to yourself and try to not tell them how much you dislike it.

Anyway, Nora Roberts (yes, THAT Nora Roberts) wrote a fantasy series and despite the fact I should absolutely love it, the first book is positively awful.

[criphd]

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I confess that I have only read the “Jewish” parts of Marxism and Form (1971), my favorite work by Fredric Jameson, the great literary theorist who died this week. That is to say, I have read the chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács—all but the chapter on Sartre, which is, at least for me, a hundred pages of impenetrable, gentile boredom. The names of these theorists are emblazoned on the book’s cover as if they were a musical supergroup, like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Jameson was trying to explain and defend Hegelian Marxism, which promised that historical materialism could approach literary texts not as propaganda or morality plays, but as complex forms, in whose development we could chart the course of an evolving, universal history. Somehow, the book he ended up writing consists of a series of mournful vignettes about Central European Jewish intellectuals.

It’s hard to know what Jameson would have thought of this observation, not just because his origins were WASPy and patrician, but because he largely avoided personal reflection, even as he built a superstar career defending, often single handedly, Marxism’s claim to primacy among High Theories. But the Jewishness of Marxism and Form is no coincidence. It reflects the “elective affinity” Michael Löwy would later trace between early 20th-century Central European Jewish writers, barred by antisemitic prejudice from academic postings, and thus institutionally marginalized and driven toward a utopian, romantic mode of left-wing politics. Löwy’s student Enzo Traverso later studied a cohort of doubly “heretical” adherents of what he called “Judeo-Marxism,” who rejected the vulgar, dogmatic scientism of Karl Kautsky and the Second International, as well as Orthodox religiosity and post-war Zionism. Often rebels against both Jewish and contemporary left pieties, these Judeo-Marxists produced eccentric, offbeat theories, probed the arcane troves of Kabbalah and Christian mysticism, and tended more toward modernist experimentation than by-the-book socialist realism. Thus, if one wanted, as Jameson did, to find sources for a Marxism that was intellectually rich, thick with ironies and paradoxes, and critically adequate not just to proletarian novels and folks songs, but to Balzac and Beethoven (and then, in Jameson’s eclectic, catholic, and massive corpus of writing, to pretty much any cultural artifact whatsoever), then of course one would end up writing about Jews.

And despite Jameson’s ideal of objective impersonality, there are hints he was aware of his Jewish focus. A section epigraph in his chapter on Ernst Bloch reads, “Next Year in Jerusalem! —Old Jewish Prayer,” the single pithiest distillation of the utopian longing that animates Jameson’s whole career. More telling, perhaps, is the uncharacteristically personal turn with which he concludes his discussion of Marcuse, writing that despite the bleak, unrevolutionary conditions of mid-century American capitalism, “it pleases me for another moment still to contemplate the stubborn rebirth of the idea of freedom” in several minds, the last of which is that of Marcuse, the “philosopher, in the exile of that immense housing development which is the state of California, remembering, reawakening, reinventing—from the rows of products in the supermarkets, from the roar of traffic of the freeways and the ominous shape of the helmets of traffic policemen, from the incessant overhead traffic of the fleets of military transport planes, as it were from beyond them, in the future—the almost extinct form of the Utopian idea.”

In Jameson’s hands, the paradigmatically Jewish condition of exile undergoes a double metamorphosis, first into Marcuse’s estrangement from the land of his birth by the Nazi catastrophe, which either killed or uprooted nearly all of Jameson’s book’s subjects, and then second, into the existential predicament of the social theorist lost in post-war consumer capitalism, adrift in a history that seemed to have lost its plot. That predicament, and his oft-repeated, defiant insistence that nonetheless, one must not, could not, forget Jerusalem and the dream of a redeemed future, was, of course, Jameson’s great theme. So it pleases me, in spite of his studied impersonality, to point out that in 1971, Jameson had only recently left Harvard for the University of California, San Diego, where he overlapped with Marcuse for several years—and that perhaps here is an autobiographical clue that Jameson was a quiet devotee of our exilic tradition, which he reimagined as the melancholy condition of the left intellectual in an unfriendly historical moment, struggling to transform his nostalgia into hope for a future, into a yearning for a world transformed.

-- from the jewish currents shabbat reading list & parshat nitzavim-vayelech [idk if it's accessible now but i've linked a sign up to the newsletter]

[cool-jpgs-of-wizards-with-swords]

couch it in as much cringe as you want, but posting is a literary form. and that's very funny by itself