2 - Genre: the social construction of sensation

Summary

The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life.

GENRE

In a work of this nature, it becomes necessary to address and, to an extent, to problematize the concept of genre. M.E. Braddon, Ouida, and Rhoda Broughton are identified as the chief exponents of certain genres or sub-genres of the popular novel: roughly, the sensation novel, the novel of high life, and the domestic romance. Critics identified them as authors of books, usually early in their careers, that “fit” these definitions, and then read their subsequent works against those generic designations, often regardless of how far afield the texts themselves wandered from those definitions. Yet, upon close examination, even the early texts may be read “outside” of the genre which they supposedly, to perfection, exemplify. Consequently, a working definition of “genre,” although necessary, is elusive.

Formalist definitions of genre rely on a permutation of the natural sciences model, creating a taxonomy of texts by family resemblances. These definitions rely on three assumptions: that resemblances between texts are more pertinent than differences; that there is a natural hierarchy of textual characteristics (a book is assigned its genre often on the basis of plot, rarely on the basis of a “minor” character) and genre is based on the ones at the “top” of that hierarchy; and that genre is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, to any given text.