Colour photograph of the top of old books on a shelf, with frayed edges, warped pages and similar signs of age.
Old book bindings at the Merton College, Oxford library.

Genre (from the French "genre" meaning "kind" or "sort") is the term for any category of literature based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.

The following portals list works on Wikisource sorted by genre: