The Humanities Index

Revenge tragedy depicts a son’s revenge for a father’s murder (or vice versa). The murder is revealed and directed to the protagonist by the murdered man’s ghost. Revenge results from conscious and focused action.

Comedy is poetry that transmutes a sad beginning into a happy ending.

An allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived not only to make sense in themselves, but also to signify a second, correlated order of persons, things, concepts, or events.

“Gothic signifies a writing of excess. It appears in the awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality. It shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence. Gothic atmospheres—gloomy and mysterious—have repeatedly signaled the disturbing return of pasts upon presents and evoked emotions of terror [...]

Satire is an ironic literary creation detailing the defeat of decency and virtue and the triumph of folly or vice.