Genre Theory and Historicism

• Main Authors: Ted Underwood, NovelTM Research Group
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University 2016-10-01
• Series: Journal of Cultural Analytics
• Subjects: Cultural Analytics; Digital Humanities
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/dav64

Genre is a word whose time has come — and gone — and might now, perhaps, be coming back again. Debates about particular literary kinds have been common in literary criticism since Aristotle's Poetics, but they acquired a new intensity and reflexivity in the third quarter of the twentieth century, as structuralists and post-structuralists struggled to redefine the concept of genre itself. From Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) through Jacques Derrida's "Law of Genre" (1980), genre theory gave scholars a way to connect literary works to durable cultural patterns — or challenge the possibility of that connection.