The distinction between literary genera is now made on the basis of a number of features:

• form of presentation,
• the possibility of expressing the author’s evaluation,
• the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, as well as between representativeness and expressiveness.

Lyric (from the name of the musical experiment) – a story about life, given through the prism of experiences of the author, that is the most subjective genre of literature.

The fact is that the thoughts and experiences of the lyrical hero are the transmitting form of lyricism. Because of this, a lyric always shows the world in refraction through the perception of the lyrical “I”. Subjective evaluation therefore prevails, and the lyric is often understood not so much as a representation of the world as a representation of the subject who perceives the world. In lyrics, expressiveness prevails over representativeness.

Epic works contain passages in which the authors directly express their emotional attitude toward what is being described. Such passages are called lyrical digressions. Most often, however, lyrics are realized in verse genres.

An epic is an objectified account of life, for example, in the form of a novel or a story proper. The transmitting form of the epic is the narrative.
The presence of a narrator or storyteller in a pure epic creates a distance between the world being described and the world of the reader, which allows for an evaluation of the events being described. Epic is aimed at depicting some object, it is dominated by representationalism. Epic genres are characterized by a pronounced plot, the presence of characters, although these features in the last hundred years are subjected to a significant rethinking.

Drama is a depiction of life through the words and actions of the characters.
Drama is usually set on stage, although there are dramas written primarily for reading. This is especially true of intellectual dramas. The transmissive form of drama as a kind is action in dialogue. The events and experiences of the characters in the drama are presented directly to the viewer (or reader) as if he were a witness to the events. In drama, the expression of the author’s evaluation is as difficult as possible. The word in drama reproduces the process of verbal communication and is almost the only means of expressing the inner world of the characters; it is inconceivable without being accompanied by the actions of the characters (in the text of the drama, these actions are replaced by terse and purely descriptive remarks of the author). In the drama, expressiveness and representativeness are balanced.

The boundaries between the genera of literature. Lyro-epic

There are many works in which the boundaries of the genera are not strictly observed. Such works are called syncretic. An example is the lyro-epic genus.

The lyro-epic genus is a literary genus that combines features of epic and lyric.

There are vivid examples of lyrical prose in which subjective experiences come to the fore and often even overshadow the events of the work.

Besides, in some works that are formally intended only for reading, that is, they tend toward the epic, the narration is constructed in such a way that there are no traces of a narrator or narrative narrator, and the account of events is so laconic that the text as a whole reminds us to a high degree of remarks by dramatic characters and the author’s remarks. However, this does not mean that literary genera represents something unreal – another “invention” of scientists. The fact is that literary genera are not a prescription. Rather, they should be treated as auxiliary schemes that allow us to order and classify the real diversity of literary texts and the possibilities realized in them. And in this case it is not so important for the understanding of a literary work whether the literary genus is realized in its pure form or whether it appears in a mixture with other genera.

Literary genera are sometimes considered historically: first there is the epic as an objective narrative of the life of an ethnos, then there is the lyric as an expression of the subjective beginning, then there is the drama as a kind of synthesis of the lyric and the epic. But this is rather a logical history, the history of ideas or the history of the development of the absolute idea according to Hegel. In reality, the literary development looks more complicated and hardly fits into the dialectic of the objective and subjective for the simple reason that in addition to the author and the world, there is a third force in this development – the reader.

It should be borne in mind that in some cases the same term is used at different levels of classification of literary genera and genres. This applies primarily to the term “drama,” which is used to refer to both genus and species.