Inherent in the form seems to be a tradition of experiment and revaluation (Preminger). Typical Bible stories included the creation, Noah's ark, the crucifixion, and the apocalypse.ĭrama has often been the site of extreme controversy. They often built makeshift stages on carts that were used to move around towns between performances. Church fathers wrote religious plays as a way of staging Biblical stories during religious holidays. The Romans inherited and built upon the Greek dramatic form together, the Greek tragedies and Roman comedies provided a basic foundation for European drama until as late as the 19th century (once they were rediscovered in the Renaissance).ĭrama had a second beginning in the church plays of medieval Europe. (Plays in other cultures such as Ancient Egypt, China, and Japan likewise began from celebrations of gods.) Eventually, dramatists added more characters and complicated the plots. In the first staged plays, the dramatists added a non-chorus character that spoke to the chorus the main plot was the tension that arose from their question and answer dialogue. This elaborate definition has since been revised and narrowed down to "a story told in action by actors who impersonate the characters of the story" (Holman 154).Īncient Greek drama arose from the dithyramb, a song and dance celebration in honor of the wine god Dionysus. In his Poetics, Aristotle defines drama as being made up of Plot, Characters, Diction, Thought (or propriety), Spectacle (such as scenery, lights, and special effects), and Melody (musical accompaniment) (632). Many of these stories also reduced to religious allegories, such as the epics of saints' lives.ĭrama in Western civilization has had two parallel beginnings, both related to religious celebration: the first in Ancient Greece and the second in medieval church plays. Common themes include courage in war and stories of love.ĭuring the Middle Ages, narrative poems transformed into courtly romance stories – Christian stories about heroic knights and the spiritual temptations they face on their journey, such as the Arthurian legends. Repetitive frames are also frequent within the poem, and the narrative itself is episodic and abrupt in transitions. When written down, they are typically divided into abcb -rhymed stanzas to emphasize the elements of song. Stylistically similar to epics, the ballads are story poems that could be chanted in groups about common people. More modern epic poems have been recorded in Spain and France, the Ottoman Empire, and as late as the 20th century in the Balkans. Even a millennium before Homer, bards were recording an already ancient oral tradition of epic poems in Sumer and Egypt (Preminger 544). Typical figures include demi-gods, kings, and military heroes. The stories were not memorized as is generally assumed but instead bards improvised oral chants, relying on heavy alliterative and assonantal techniques, which seemed to put both the bard and the audience into a trance (Preminger 542).Īn epic is a long non-stanzaic "poem on a great and serious subject, told in an elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race" (Abrams 51). Narrative or story telling developed from ritualistic chanting of myths, and has traditionally been grouped into two poetic categories, epic and ballad. A narrative tells a story or a tale drama is presented on a stage, where actors embody characters lyric has been loosely defined as any short poem other than narrative and drama, where poets express their state of mind. Narrative, Lyric, and Drama are the three general literary forms into which writing, especially poetry, has traditionally been grouped. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Lacoön: an essay on the limits of painting and poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. "Towards a Newer Laocoon." Clement Greenberg: The Collected essays and criticism. "Art and Objecthood." Artforum (Summer 1967): 12-23. "Literary Genres." Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. New York: The Modern Library, 1947.ĭucrot, Owsald, and Tzvetan Todorov. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1988.Īristotle.
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