1 - Genre definitions

Summary

The strong emotional repugnance felt by many critics toward any form of schematization in poetics is … the result of a failure to distinguish criticism as a body of knowledge from the direct experience of literature, where every act is unique, and classification has no place. Whenever schematization appears in the following pages, no importance is attached to the schematic form itself, which may be only the result of my own lack of ingenuity. Much of it, I expect and in fact hope, may be mere scaffolding, to be knocked away when the building is in better shape.

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1957, p. 29

Literary kinds ‘may be regarded as institutional imperatives which both coerce and are in turn coerced by the writer …’. Genre should be conceived … as a grouping of literary works based … upon both outer form (specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitudes, tone, purpose – more crudely, subject and audience). The ostensible basis may be the one or the other … but the critical problem will then be to find the other dimensions, to complete the diagram.