What is "genre"

Genre \Gen"re\ (zh[aum]N"r'), n. [F. See Gender.]

1. Kind; genus; class; form; style, esp. in literature.

   French drama was lisping or still inarticulate; the great French genre of the fabliau was hardly born.
   --Saintsbury.

   A particular demand . . . that we shall pay special attention to the matter of genres -- that is, to the different forms or categories of literature.
   --W. P. Trent.

2. (Fine Arts) A style of painting, sculpture, or other imitative art, which illustrates everyday life and manners.

1770, as a French word in English (nativized from c.1840), from French genre "kind, sort, style" (see gender). Used especially in French for "independent style." Of painting, "depicting scenes of ordinary life" (as compared to "landscape," "historical," etc.) from 1849.

n. A kind; a stylistic category or sort, especially of literature or other artworks.

1. n. a kind of literary or artistic work

2. a style of expressing yourself in writing [syn: writing style, literary genre]

3. an expressive style of music [syn: music genre, musical genre, musical style]

4. a class of art (or artistic endeavor) having a characteristic form or technique

Genre is a 1996 Live-action/animated short film by animator Don Hertzfeldt, his second student film, preceded by Ah, L'Amour (1995).

The 16mm short combines traditional animation, pixilation, and stop-motion animation to present a cartoon rabbit careening through a variety of rapidly changing film genres as his animator struggles to come up with a good idea.

The short is Hertzfeldt's least favorite of his work, but it nevertheless was an animation festival hit that went on to receive 17 awards.

In 1997, it was shown on an episode of MTV's Cartoon Sushi.

Genre magazine was a New York city-based monthly periodical from 1992 to 2009 written for gay men. It was owned by gay press publisher Window Media.

Genre (, or ; from French genre , "kind" or "sort", from Latin genus ( stem gener-), Greek γένος, gés) is any category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres form by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones is discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.

Genre began as an absolute classification system for ancient Greek literature. Poetry, prose, and performance each had a specific and calculated style that related to the theme of the story. Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, and even actors were restricted to their genre under the assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best. In later periods genres proliferated and developed in response to changes in audiences and creators. Genre became a dynamic tool to help the public make sense out of unpredictable art. Because art is often a response to a social state, in that people write/paint/sing/dance about what they know about, the use of genre as a tool must be able to adapt to changing meanings.

Genre suffers from the same ills of any classification system. Genre is to be reassessed and scrutinized, and to weigh works on their unique merit. It has been suggested that genres resonate with people because of the familiarity, the shorthand communication, as well as the tendency of genres to shift with public mores and to reflect the zeitgeist. While the genre of storytelling has been relegated as lesser form of art because of the heavily borrowed nature of the conventions, admiration has grown. Proponents argue that the genius of an effective genre piece is in the variation, recombination, and evolution of the codes.

Genre is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture.

Genre may also refer to:

• Music genre, category of musical works with shared characteristics
• Genre (magazine), an American gay men monthly
• Genre (animated film), a short film by animator Don Hertzfeldt
• genre b.goode, an indie record label used by Australian band TISM
• Genre art, pictorial representations in any of various media that represent scenes or events from everyday life