What is the difference between form and structure?

At first thought, the difference between form and structure can seem very fine, and it may be that at times they overlap, but there is certainly a difference. Form is concerned with ideas of genre that surround a text, as well as the 'form,' or type, of the text itself, as in, whether it is a poem, play, novel. It might also include how something appears on a page, the physical form for example, as well as the paragraphs, or stanzas we see before us, the physical organisation of the text. Whilst in poetry, it may even be thought to encompass things such as rhyme scheme, although it may also be thought that this concerns structure too.

However, when analysing structure in a text, we are looking for things such as: foreshadowing; repetition; analepsis and prolepsis; paragraph and sentence structure. We may want to focus on time in the text and how the author deals with it, or even narrative structure, and the different voices and perspectives used to narrate the novel. Structure is all about pinning down the framework of a text, including its sequence of events, how they are told, and how they are all threaded together, whereas form deals with the genre of a text, and how it appears in a certain work of literature.

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Answered by Alex S. English Literature tutor

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