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The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature genre, in literature, a class or type of literary work, such as epic, lyric,

tragedy, or comedy. In classical literature the genres were carefully distinguished from each other not only by subject-matter but also by formal aspects such as dialect (in Greek), vocabulary, and metre, and the conventions of each genre were strictly adhered to. Ignorance of these has sometimes resulted in misplaced criticism, as when Samuel Johnson found inherently improbable the poet Milton's pastoral elegy Lycidas. How to cite this entry: "genre" The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Ed. M.C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Fordham University. 7 August 2008 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html? subview=Main&entry=t9.e1272> The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms genre [zhahnr] The French term for a type, species, or class of composition. A literary genre is a recognizable and established category of written work employing such common conventions as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another kind. Much of the confusion surrounding the term arises from the fact that it is used simultaneously for the most basic modes of literary art ( lyric , narrative , dramatic); for the broadest categories of composition (poetry, prose fiction), and for more specialized sub-categories, which are defined according to several different criteria including formal structure ( sonnet , picaresque novel ), length ( novella , epigram ), intention ( satire ), effect ( comedy ), origin ( folktale ), and subject-matter ( pastoral , science fiction ). While some genres, such as the pastoral elegy or the melodrama , have numerous conventions governing subject, style, and form, otherslike the novel have no agreed rules, although they may include several more limited subgenres . Adjective : generic . See also decorum, form, mode, type . For a fuller account, consult John Frow , Genre ( 2005 ). How to cite this entry: "genre" The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Fordham University. 7 August 2008 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html? subview=Main&entry=t56.e493> The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature Genre Genresor kinds, modes, forms, or species, as they have also been calledare, simply put, categories of literary texts based on similarities of form, content, or function. Beyond this simple explanation, however, lies considerable history and complexity. Defining genres and locating texts accordingly is one of the oldest, most fundamental, and most vexed methods of literary criticism. The earliest important discussion of genre comes from the Greek philosopher Plato, who in book 3 of The

Republic offered a division based on method of representation. All literature, he claimed, is presented by means of simple narration by a speaker, imitation of the speech of others, or a combination of the two, modes that he associated respectively with dithyramb (a type of lyric poem sung in praise of Dionysus, often taken to stand here for the lyric mode in general), drama, and epic (which mixes narration and dialogue). Yet while Plato's method of division is formal or stylistic, his true interest in genre may be said to lie more with content and effect, as he goes on to evaluate the kinds of subject matter appropriate for imitation and narration, and he concludes that a mode in which only the admirable deeds of virtuous men are imitated, with everything else consigned to narration, is most appropriate for the education of the citizens of his ideal republic. The first systematic work of genre theory was written by Plato's student Aristotle, who began his Poetics by defining all literature as imitation (in a broader sense than that used by Plato) and proposing three ways of categorizing it: by the means of imitation (rhythm, harmony, language in verse or prose), the object of imitation (people who are better than us, worse than us, or like us), and the manner of imitation (Plato's distinction among narrative, drama, and a combination of the two). Aristotle used these sets of categories to distinguish among comedy, tragedy, and epic; but in the extended discussion of tragedy that makes up the majority of what survives of the Poetics he invokes an array of additional means of generic classification, including meter, plot structure and devices, diction, andperhaps most importanteffect, which he presents as the goal of a genre's other constituents. In the case of tragedy, the choice of plot, characters, and style serves the production of pity, fear, and catharsis. The third major figure in classical genre theory is the Roman poet Horace. In his Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), Horace touched on tragedy, comedy, and epic, as well as some of the lyric forms defined primarily by their meters. Like his Greek predecessors, he treated genres as combinations of form, content, and effect; his chief contribution to subsequent genre theory is his emphasis on decorum, the notion that genres have appropriate styles, subjects, characters, and meters that must not be violated or mixed. Despite their similarities and interrelations, what emerges from a reading of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace is less a single theory of genre than a sense of its variety and complexity, a legacy that their influence bequeathed to the theory and practice of genre in British literature. Genre and British Literature As any reader of Geoffrey Chaucer's works, or even of his Canterbury Tales alone, will recognize, the Middle Ages was a period of considerable generic diversity. With the eclipse of much classical literary theoryHorace and some other Roman authors were read, but Plato and Aristotle's works were virtually unknownmedieval genres and genre theory combined an attenuated and often idiosyncratic awareness of classical precedent with the needs and interests of the culture and the practice of its contemporary authors. One of the culture's chief interests was religion, owing in large part to the institutional dominance of the Catholic Church, and some of the period's most sophisticated genre criticism was devoted to the Bible. Secular genre theory, though not unaware of form, was based largely on subject or plot, often with an eye toward the moral effect of the type of story told. Chaucer's Monk, for example, in the prologue to his tale, defines tragedy as a story Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee,

And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. The Monk observes that tragedies have traditionally been written in hexameter (the meter of classical heroic poetry) but acknowledges that they have also been written in prose, And eek in meetre in many a sondry wyse. The stories that make up his tale recount the downfalls of a mix of biblical, classical, and European figures, with the common lesson, Lat no man truste on blynd prosperitee. The relative paucity of interest in genre theory in the Middle Ages was dramatically reversed in the Renaissance, a period in which genre assumed a central role in literary theory and practice. That role was not, however, a simple or consistent one: the period may be characterized on the one hand by a renewed interest in classical forms and formal precepts occasioned by the rediscovery and (at times overly narrow) interpretation of Greek and Roman authorities, and on the other by an inventiveness that, perhaps spurred by the period's social ferment, explored the breaking of rules and the combining of old literary forms and the creation of new ones. One of the most importantand troublesomeformal concepts to emerge from the Renaissance engagement with classical theory is the doctrine of the three dramatic unities of time, place, and action: from Aristotle's insistence that a tragedy should represent a unified action or story line and his suggestion that this action be limited in duration to roughly a single circuit of the sun, Renaissance theorists developed the notion that drama must consist of a single action in a single setting during, at most, a single dayrequirements rarely followed in the dramatic practice of the time. If the unities are symptomatic of the period's reverence for classical rules, its other generic tendency, the drive to combine and create forms, is typified by the controversy over tragicomedy. A mingling, as its name suggests, of the characteristics of comedy and tragedy, tragicomedy was decried by some as a violation of decorum and classical precedent and defended by others as a plausible, even necessary innovation (one at times supplied with classical precedents and rationales)all the while being widely practiced and avidly attended by Renaissance playwrights and audiences. The complexity of Renaissance genre theory is exemplified by the most influential work of literary theory in Britain at the time, Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1595). The division of literature into parts, kinds, or species is central to Sidney's presentation of his topic, and the means by which he does so suggest the many facets of the period's understanding of genre. Literature, he notes, may be subdivided into sundry more special denominations. The most notable be the Heroic, Lyric, Tragic, Comic, Satiric, Iambic, Elegiac, Pastoral, and certain others, some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to write in. While he acknowledges generic distinctions based on both meter and subject, Sidney's true interest is in neither form nor content but in function. Drawing on Horace's insistence that literature should both delight and teach, he assigns to each of the genres a socially beneficial lesson. His treatment of tragedy is a case in point: combining Horace's concern with stylistic height, Aristotle's pity and fear, and Chaucer's moral instruction in a defense of the genre's social value, Sidney describes high and excellent tragedy that with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded.

As its name implies, the neoclassical period of British literature is generally associated with a reverence for classical authority and particularly with an emphasis on rules, elevating the definitional boundaries between genres and such prescriptive concepts as decorum and the unities to inviolable precepts by which the quality of literary works could be strictly judged. In part this reputation is deserved; but it is also true that some of the best evidence for the stringency of the period's formal rules is the efforts of its most notable authors and critics to loosen them. Thus John Dryden structures his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) as a dialogue, in which one character mounts a defense of the unities and another (Dryden's own stand-in) advocates bending the rules for the sake of more lifelike and pleasing plots; and Samuel Johnson in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765) argues that Shakespeare's commingling of tragedy and comedy, though a practice contrary to the rules of criticism, is more realistic and thus better suited to fulfill the instructional ends of literature. But while Johnson can defend the violation of generic precepts by insisting that there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature, it is Alexander Pope who perhaps best captures the neoclassical ideal for the relationship between art and natureand its implications for moral instruction and social orderas he qualifies his own exhortation to [f]irst follow nature: Those rules of old discovered, not devised, Are nature still, but nature methodized: Nature, like liberty, is but restrained By the same laws which first herself ordained. An Essay on Criticism (1711) If the neoclassical critics soughtthough did not always finda reconciliation of art and nature that would naturalize generic forms (and perhaps give form and order to a chaotic world), the Romantic period saw instead an oppositional relationship between generic rules and nature. Formal prescriptions were seen as artificial constraints upon the expression of the artist and the natural, organic development of the literary work. Thus, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge answers critics of Shakespeare's formal violations he does not, like Johnson, defend the playwright's combining of established forms but instead lauds Shakespeare's rejection of predefined generic rules altogether: The true ground of the [critics'] mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within (Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Genius, 1836). Though poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats continued to make use of traditional forms like the sonnet, genre theoryespecially in the neoclassical mode of classification and evaluationfell out of favor, supplanted in part by theories of poetry more concerned with the expressive and affective power of literature as a whole (see, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defense of Poetry, 1840). A number of post-Romantic literary and theoretical developments extended and expanded critical skepticism about genre's value to literary criticism from a variety of perspectives. In the nineteenth century and beyond, the dominance of the novel, with its apparently unlimited subject matter and seeming lack of formal conventions, appeared

to exceed the traditional means of generic specification. Subsequent modernist formal innovation and experimentation from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), and postmodernist formal subversion and transgression from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952) to Martin Amis's Time's Arrow (1991), further challenged the comprehensiveness and stability of generic categories. In literary theory, mid-twentieth-century American New Criticism's emphasis on a text's individual intrinsic form devalued genre as a critical tool; more recently the poststructuralist concept of textuality shifted attention from literary genre to the linguistic and rhetorical properties of texts in general, while deconstruction called into question the solidity of generic boundaries and the authority of generic laws. Three Questions This brief and selective history does not offer, and indeed would seem to thwart, conclusions about the nature of genre. It does, however, suggest a series of related questions that must be addressed by any genre theory. What are genres? If genres are groups of literary texts, what are the characteristics that define them? The preceding discussion touched on definitions of genre based on modes of representation, subject matter, plot trajectory, meter, stanza form (as in the sonnet), style, elevation of language, emotional effect, and moral instructionand this list is hardly all-inclusive. One distinction often used in discussions of generic characteristics is that between form (which would include criteria like meter, stanza structure, and plot structure) and content (including subject, character type, and, more broadly, mood, attitude, and effect). Some critics have argued that any adequate definition of genre must include both form and content (or what Ren Wellek and Austin Warren in Theory of Literature [1942] have called outer and inner form); in any case, most viable theories of genre, even those that emphasize a single method of distinction, admit multiple defining characteristics. Another important issue in the definition of genres is category size, often framed by means of the distinction among mode, genre, and subgenre. Generally thought of as larger and more fundamental than genres, the three literary modes are usually said to be narrative, drama, and lyric (or poetry); derived from Plato's original tripartite modal distinction, these three modes have often been correlated with other seemingly universal triads like past, present, and future or first, second, and third person. Subgenres, conversely, are considered subsets of genres, neither large nor distinctive enough to stand on their own. But while the mode/genre distinction is usually clear and stable (as in drama/comedy, or narrative/short story), that between genre and subgenre is much less so: How do we characterize a form like the mystery novel, which emerges as a subgenre of the novel, becomes both prolific and formally distinctive, and eventually develops its own subgenres (amateur sleuth, hard-boiled detective, police procedural)? This issue of generic development introduces a second major question. Where do genres come from? Are generic distinctions rooted in logical possibilities, like Aristotle's division of subject matter into persons better than, worse than, or like us? Are they, as Pope suggests, natural, their content, function, or both being based on the innate structures of the natural (or social) world or the human mind? Are they, as much Renaissance and neoclassical criticism insisted, founded on the authority and precedent of the past? Or

do they emergeand declinein response to the needs and preferences of the present? Two conceptual distinctions have proven useful for exploring these questions. First, are genres descriptive (describing an existing state of affairs) or prescriptive (setting out rules that should or must be followed)? When Aristotle sets forth the available means, objects, and manners of poetic imitation, or discusses the practice of contemporary playwrights, his criticism is descriptive; but when he begins to discuss what a tragedy should and should not be and how best to achieve the proper effect, he moves toward the prescriptiveand certainly he was understood that way by later critics who turned his suggestions into rules, and by those who in turn rejected those rules as artificial and constraining. Second, are genres static or dynamic? That is, are the genres and their characteristics fixed, limited and unchanging, or do new genres arise and established genres change (or disappear)? Renaissance critics accepted and endorsed the classical generic canon as either a prescription or a description of literary possibility, even as the period's authors created new formswhich the critics either prescriptively condemned or descriptively assimilated. And if the Romantic resistance to genre was based largely on the constraints of neoclassical prescriptiveness, subsequent generic skepticism has more often involved the inadequacy of a static descriptive conception of genre in the face of new, altered, or hybridized forms. What do genres do? Questions about the nature and origins of genres are inseparable from questions about their function. Do genres produce emotional effects, as Aristotle's discussion of tragedy suggests? Or are they educative, as Sidney claims, with different forms offering different lessons? Are genres, as the neoclassical critics often treated them, tools for evaluating works of literature, not only grouping them but judging their success according to their adherence to formal rules? Or, as more recent critics have suggested, do genres offer different ways of seeing the world, or differing responses to common problems or issues? Something that almost all of these possibilities have in common is an understanding of genres as means of communication, and an exploration of genre's function might thus be pursued in terms of three of communication's components: sender, receiver, and context (a fourth, medium, would be genre itself). For the sender or author, genres might be said to provide rules, or, less prescriptively, models or guidelines that can be followed, modified, or rejected. For the receiver or reader, genres offer sets of expectations that, whether fulfilled or not, can guide the reader's understanding (and perhaps evaluation) of individual works. And through their ubiquity and iterability, genres provide the cultural contexts in which they function with a set of common grounds, a powerful means of disseminating and, if not enforcing, at least reinforcing worldviews, moral behaviors, or the social order implicit in generic rules and hierarchies. Genre Theory Today Romantic and post-Romantic literary and theoretical developments did not displace genre as an important tool for literary analysis; if anything, the value of genre has been affirmed and enhanced by its accommodation of the very forms said to herald its demise, from the Romantic lyric to the postmodern novel. Genre theory has, however, evolved in response to these developments in significant ways. Contemporary genre theory is usually descriptive rather than prescriptive, and while some descriptive

criticism still strives for comprehensiveness and universality (as seen in the continuing influence of Northrop Frye's masterly work of literary taxonomy, Anatomy of Criticism), most recent theories of genre emphasize a dynamic flexibility and responsiveness that can be characterized in the following ways. Nonexhaustive. Genres, as Alastair Fowler has persuasively argued, are not exhaustively defined classes but rather groups or families of texts related by resemblance rather than uniformity. While most, if not all, members of a genre may have a particular trait, there is no comprehensive set of characteristics that all members of a genre mustor dohave, and few if any members of a genre bear all the traits associated with it. The goal of genre theory so understood is not to rule texts in or out as much as to note and explore significant similarities and differences among them. Relational. Genres are best understood not in isolation, as independent and self-sufficient, but in relation to other genres in what might be called a culture's generic system. The nature and function of one genre is dependent on those of its coexistent genres, whether by opposition (comedy and tragedy) or contiguity (satire and parody). Insight into individual texts may be had by considering which genres they do not belong to or partake of as well as which genres they do, and even the most seemingly sui generis of texts must be understood in the context of the forms and conventions it eschews; in this sense, every text, if it is to be at all intelligible, partakes of the system of genres. Nonrestrictive. Genres function not as rules that must be followed, but as guidelines and opportunities. They may be played with and played off of, adapted, rearranged, selectively applied, inverted, parodied, or otherwise put to use. Such uses constitute not violations of, but comments on, modifications to, or expansions of the genre in question. Interpenetrable. Rather than being strictly and inviolably demarcated, as some Renaissance and neoclassical interpreters of Aristotle and Horace insisted, genres can and do intermingle, hybridize, and combine. A text primarily of one genre may take on aspects of the subject matter, tone, or form of another to emerge as a hybrid (like the pastoral comedy of As You Like It), or two genres may join to become a third (as in tragicomedy). While such an understanding of genre may seem obvious in light of the postmodern valorization of pastiche, appropriation, and intertextuality, critics such as Rosalie Colie and Ralph Cohen have argued for generic interplay and combination as fundamental principles of Renaissance and eighteenth-century generic practice as well. Historically variable. In addition to being studied synchronically (in relation to other genres coexisting at the same time), genres, to be fully understood, must also be viewed diachronically (as existing and changing over time). Although some theorists continue to seek the universal or transhistorical essences of genres, most contemporary criticism emphasizes that genres are not static: they appear, often developing out of other genres (as the novel arose from various forms of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prose fiction); they evolve (classical Greek tragedy differs from Shakespearean tragedy, which in turn differs from modern tragic drama); and they fade from contemporary usage (like the

epic or the pastoral), perhaps to be revived, often in very different form (as the modern and postmodern novel from Joyce's Ulysses [1922] to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow [1973] may be said to have revived the epic). Generic preferences and hierarchies also change, with different genres dominating different periods (as satire did in the Augustan period, or the lyric in the Romantic), altering the generic system in the process. The engines that drive generic change may be thought of as internal (authorial innovation, changing literary tastes) or external (social, political, or other historical developments)though the two types may be difficult if not impossible to distinguish, as each influences the other. While much traditional literary history has been devoted to tracing the internal development of genres and genre systems, some of the most important recent work on genre has explored its external involvements, investigating the connections between a period's literary forms and its extraliterary historyboth the ways in which historical circumstances shape the rise, significance, and fall of genres, and the ways in which genres reflect, address, and perhaps influence the societies in which they appear. Contemporary genre theory is thus a means not only of classifying and interpreting individual texts, but also of understanding the history of literature and the relationship between text and culture. See also Literary Theory and Literature. Further Reading Cohen, Ralph. On the Interrelations of Eighteenth-Century Literary Forms. In New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Phillip Harth, pp.3378. New York, 1974. A leading figure in contemporary genre criticism challenges the traditional understanding of neoclassical genre theory as static and rigid by arguing for a relational, combinatory practice that is responsive to social needs. Colie, Rosalie L. The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance. Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski. Berkeley, CA, 1973. Brief, accessible volume showing how Renaissance writers developed and combined genres in the service of genre's cultural function, the presentation of and reflection on ways of seeing the world. Dubrow, Heather. Genre. London, 1982. A concise but thorough introduction to the function, history, and future of genre and genre theory, with good selected bibliography. Duff, David, ed. Modern Genre Theory. New York, 2000. Useful introductory essay precedes a collection of important twentieth-century statements on genre, including excerpts from works by Colie, Fowler, and Frye, Jameson, and Jauss listed here. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, MA, 1982. Detailed, systematic presentation of genre theory, with an emphasis on genre's flexible, relational, and historically variable nature. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ, 1957. Important work of archetypal or structuralist genre criticism, offering four fundamental systems for classifying literary works. Jameson, Fredric. Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism. In The Political Unconscious, pp.103150. Ithaca, NY, 1981. Valuable discussion of the political and ideological uses of genre. Jauss, Hans Robert. Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature. In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, translated by Timothy Bahti, pp.76109. Minneapolis, MN, 1982. Uses medieval literature to illustrate a reader-response theory of genres not as

universal categories but as historically specific sets of interpretive guidelines for readers. Theorizing Genres I and II. New Literary History 34, no. 2 and 34, no. 3 (Spring and Summer 2003). These special issues of a journal that frequently addresses matters of genre introduce and provide a variety of examples of the current state of genre theory. Stephen Cohen How to cite this entry: Stephen Cohen "Genre" The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. David Scott Kastan. Oxford University Press 2005. Fordham University. 7 August 2008 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html? subview=Main&entry=t198.e0185> The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07. genre (zhnr) (KEY) , in art-history terminology, a type of painting dealing with unidealized scenes and subjects of everyday life. Although practiced in ancient art, as shown by Pompeiian frescoes, and in the Middle Ages, genre was not recognized as worthy and independent subject matter until the 16th cent. in Flanders. There it was popularized by Pieter Bruegel, the elder. It flourished in Holland in the 17th cent. in the works of Ter Borch, Brouwer, Metsu, De Hooch, Vermeer, and many others, and extended to France and England, where in the 18th and 19th cent., its major practitioners were Watteau, Chardin, Greuze, Morland, and Wilkie. In Italy genre elements were present in Carpaccios and Caravaggios paintings, but not until the 18th cent. did genre become the specialty of an Italian artist, Pietro Longhi. The French impressionists often painted genre subjects as did members of the American ashcan school. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2007 Columbia University Press. http://www.bartleby.com/65/ge/genre.html

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