List of genres
This is a list of genres of literature and entertainment (film, television, music, and video games), excluding genres in the visual arts.
This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.Genre is the term for any category of creative work, which includes literature and other forms of art or entertainment (e.g. music)—whether written or spoken, audio or visual—based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.
: A story about a war or battle that can either be historical or fictional. It usually follows the events a certain warrior goes through during the battle's events.
Military fiction
: A story about a secret agent (spy) or military personnel member who is sent on an espionage mission. Usually, they are equipped with special gadgets that prove useful during the mission, and they have special training in things such as unarmed combat or computer hacking. They may or may not work for a specific government.
Spy fiction
Anthology
Anthology film
and quality television: Television shows like David Lynch's Twin Peaks series and BBC's The Singing Detective also have "a loosening of causality, a greater emphasis on psychological or anecdotal realism, violations of classical clarity of space and time, explicit authorial comment, and ambiguity".
Art film
Crime
Detective
Experimental
Absurdist
Exploitation film
Blaxploitation
Gothic
Gothic romance
Contemporary fantasy
Musical film
: This subgenre presents fictional drama the lives of police and/or detectives. Stories in this genre typically revolve around a crime that has been committed and must be solved by the end of the episode following a very generic and usually unchanging structure of events: the crime is committed, witnesses are questioned, an arrest occurs, and then a judicial conclusion wraps it up. The show communicates everything "by the book", as it would happen in real life. Examples include: Dragnet, which pioneered this genre; Law & Order, which follows officers up to the point of reading newly-arrested criminals their Miranda rights; and Dick Tracy (1990).
Police procedural
Romance
Gothic romance film
Serial
Dizi
Social problem film
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Social: In Indian cinema terminology, social films (or simply socials) are films with a contemporary setting, as opposed to those with mythological and period settings. (Not to be confused with social films.)
[21]
: A genre in which protagonists play athletics or other games of competition.[20] Examples include films like Remember the Titans (2000) and The Longest Yard (2005), and shows like Friday Night Lights.
Sports
: A serial melodrama, popular in Latin America and the Philippines, that are similar to a soap opera in miniseries format. They often feature love and drama, as well as other situations depending on the genre of telenovela. Examples include: Desire, Fashion House, and Wicked Wicked Games.
Telenovela
Thriller
mystery in the crime genre
Beat 'em ups
Hack and slash
: games in which two or more playable characters fight, each character usually having their own unique moves. Often, the goal of the game is to be the last man standing. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter are generally credited with popularizing the fighting game.
Fighting
Platform
Super Mario
Shooter
First-person shooter
: The player must proceed through an environment or complete an objective without being seen, as in the Metal Gear series of games.
Stealth
Survival
Battle royale
: A somewhat somber, quieter style of music whose name refers to the unhappiness of the performer. These became popular in the early 20th century alongside jazz, and influenced the early development of rock music. A major genre within R&B, and one of its earliest genres as well.
Blues
Country music
Bluegrass
Electronic music
Ambient
: more rhythmically based, mostly African-American urban-derived genres, with a wide array of subgenres between them.
Hip hop and rap
: originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. Jazz has, from its early 20th-century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and late 1980s developments such as acid jazz, which blended jazz influences into funk and hip-hop.
Jazz
Pop
Adult contemporary music
Rock
Folk rock
(R&B) and Soul music: an evolving range of genres of popular African-American music that first began to develop in the early 20th century.