Hybrid genre
literary genre that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres
A hybrid genre is a literary or film genre that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres. Hybrid genre works are also referred to as cross-genre, multi-genre, mixed genre, or fusion genre. Some hybrid genres have acquired their own specialised names, such as comedy drama ("dramedy"), romantic comedy ("rom-com"), horror Western, and docudrama.
A Dictionary of Media and Communication describes hybrid genre as "the combination of two or more genres", which may combine elements of more than one genre and/or which may "cut across categories such as fact and fiction".
Hybrid genres are a longstanding element in the fictional process. An early literature example is William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with its blend of poetry, prose, and engravings. In cinema, the merging of two or more separate genres attracts a broader range of audience type.
Examples
Literature
In contemporary literature, Dimitris Lyacos's trilogy Poena Damni combines fictional prose with drama and poetry in a multilayered narrative developing through the different characters of the work.
Many contemporary women of color have published cross-genre works, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Giannina Braschi, Guadalupe Nettel, and Bhanu Kapil. Giannina Braschi creates linguistic and structural hybrids of comic fantasy and tragic comedy in Spanish, Spanglish, and English prose and poetry.
The public source identifies “Hybrid genre” as literary genre that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hybrid, genre and literary.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hybrid genre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.