Watch The Western Story Lecture #6: The Genres of Western Learning: Novels, Plays, Poems, Essays and Treatises

The Greeks, as the saying goes, had a word for it - and rules to go with it. Classical authors who worked within a given literary genre always followed those rules, which governed their vocabulary, meter, style, form, content and length. The modern world has rejected these rules in the name of freedom, but this has not served so much to free the author as to confuse him, and his audience too.