Marjan Jadidi, Stephan Kessler

• Labels such as ‘fantasy fiction’ or ‘contemporary novel’ are often used to categorise written fiction. Although scholars have given many explications of such concepts and descriptions of respective text groups, they seldom try to render an entire taxonomy that considers consistent criteria. Our working paper aims to do this but does not intend to reorganise the world of literature. Rather, we want to describe the accepted literary genres and their relational patterns more objectively. For this, we go through a new methodological direction and borrow from biology’s phylogenetic classification. Eventually, time relations and how they were narratively handled (also leading to the general composition of the storyworld’s space, characters, and objects) are the decisive criteria in structuring the parts of the taxonomy concerning fiction. As a corollary, literary genres and literary families must be distinguished because the concept of genre factors in the characters’ social roles, aspirations and fortunes represented by typical plots and additionally by their perspectives. We discuss in this context how Booker’s basic plot model compliments our conception of literary families well.