26 - Theories of genre

Summary

Debates about genre, like debates over Romanticism and Classicism, could have a political dimension. This sort of understanding about the nature of genre continues into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Surveying nineteenth-century Anglophone criticism in search of statements about genre, one finds mostly scattered comments in histories and assertions derived from Romantic thinkers. Historicism's struggle with psychology is an underlying dynamic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of literary kinds. Historical considerations helped the Romantics view genre as something that could perform philosophical and psychological work. Nineteenth-century Russian criticism, like Italian criticism, can be divided into liberal and conservative camps, though the Russian critics influenced by Vissarion Belinsky were more progressive in their politics than the Italians influenced by Francesco De Sanctis. Literary practice also helps place in perspective the fluctuation of generic hierarchies among nineteenth-century theorists.