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Fable

A short story or folk tale, often with a specific moral outcome intended to instruct the audience.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Fable"

• Aesop and Ananse: Animal Fables and Trickster Tales
• Fables and Trickster Tales Around the World
• Morality "Tails" East and West: European Fables and Buddhist Jataka Tales

Fairy Tale

Stories either created or strongly influenced by oral traditions. The plots often feature stark conflicts between good and evil, with magic and luck determining the usually happy endings.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "fairy tale"

• Fairy Tales Around the World
• Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales
• The Magical World of Russian Fairy Tales
• Unicorns, Dragons, and Other Magical Creatures

Fantasy

A type of story that includes elements of magic in plot, setting, or theme. The story's main characters may or may not enter the fantasy world from the real world.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Fantasy"

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Nonsense Poetry and Whimsy
• Tales of King Arthur
• Unicorns, Dragons, and Other Magical Creatures

Fiction

Literary works, most often prose narrative, that are imaginative rather than factual.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "fiction"

• A Trip to Wonderland: The Nursery 'Alice'
• American Literary Humor: Mark Twain, George Harris, and Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper"--Writing Women
• Esperanza Rising: Learning Not to Be Afraid to Start Over
• Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: Form of a Funeral
• Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find": Who's the Real Misfit?
• Folklore in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Kate Chopin's The Awakening: No Choice but Under?
• Knowledge or Instinct? Jack London's "To Build a Fire"
• More than a Metaphor: Allegory and the Art of Persuasion
• Nature and Culture Detectives: Investigating Jack London's White Fang
• Pioneer Values in Willa Cather's My Antonia
• Profiles in Courage: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
• Profiles in Courage: To Kill A Mockingbird and the Scottsboro Boys Trial
• Rudyard Kipling's "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi": Mixing Fact and Fiction
• Rudyard Kipling's "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi": Mixing Words and Pictures
• Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"
• Tales of the Supernatural
• The "Secret Society" and FitzGerald's The Great Gatsby
• The Red Badge of Courage: A New Kind of Courage
• The Red Badge of Courage: A New Kind of Realism
• William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: Narrating the Compson Family Decline and the Changing South

Folklore

First coined in 1846 by William John Thoms, a British antiquarian. Folklore can be divided into its two component words, folk and lore. Folklore is thus all the lore shared by a particular folk.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "folklore"

• Folklore in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Helpful Animals and Compassionate Humans in Folklore

Gothic

An artistic style characterized by melodrama, terror, madness, and irony. Southern Gothic, a specific type of the Gothic, is unique to American literature and includes elements of the "grotesque," deeply flawed and repulsive characters or situations.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Gothic"

• Charles Baudelaire: Poète Maudit (The Cursed Poet)
• Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and the Unreliable Biographers
• Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and the Unreliable Narrator
• Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find": Who's the Real Misfit?
• Introducing Jane Eyre: An Unlikely Victorian Heroine
• Tales of the Supernatural

Graphic Novel

A type of book that, in the visual style of comics, presents its fully developed story in panels of juxtaposed text and illustration.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Graphic Novel"

• 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae: Herodotus' Real History
• Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" in Graphical Representation