By Jonathan Blake
Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher of the fourth century BCE, is widely considered the first thinker to systematically classify dramatic forms. In his seminal work *Poetics*, he distinguishes between three primary modes of poetic imitation: tragedy, comedy, and epic. This tripartite division is based not only on the structure of the narrative but also on the emotional effect it produces in the audience and its relationship to reality.
According to Aristotle, tragedy is an art of imitation that evokes pity and fear, leading to a catharsis of such emotions. Comedy, on the other hand, focuses on human flaws and social follies, provoking laughter and pleasure. Epic poetry, with its elevated language and heroic scope, stands somewhere between the two. Aristotle also differentiates between means of expression (verse or prose), mode of imitation (action or narration), and the moral quality of characters—concepts that continue to inform genre theory today.
Although Aristotle’s classification was rooted in the performative traditions of ancient Athens, his framework had a lasting influence on Western literary and dramatic criticism for centuries. From the tragedies of Shakespeare to the realist drama of modern cinema, traces of Aristotelian logic remain central to how we define and evaluate genre.
Aristotle’s greatest contribution is perhaps not the categories themselves, but the idea that form, content, and emotional impact are deeply intertwined. Genre, in this view, is not merely a set of tropes or themes, but a mode of organizing human experience through narrative structure and audience response.
Source: Aristotle, Poetics, various classical and modern commentaries.