Genre

Abstract

From the French for “kind” or “sort,” and etymologically derived from the Latin genus , the word “genre” has connotations of biological kind, and its use in relation to the arts begins in the late eighteenth century, not long after the establishment of Linnaean taxonomy. Theoretical and critical work on commercial or popular genres – notably detective and science fiction, but also pornography, the erotic thriller, the western, the romance – are relatively recent developments, emerging in number first in the late 1960s and early 1970s against the backdrop of New Left cultural politics. In literature, genre – for example, detective fiction in Auster (1987) – has been used as a metafictional cast within which questions of individual, collective, and authorial identity, as well as ideas of “textuality” and a textual or linguistic self, are interrogated. Notions of genre are implicated to varying degree in all literary study; the more refined and complex the study of literature becomes, the less stable are the ideas of genre and genres themselves. In literary studies today, scholarly focus has to some degree shifted away from definition: volumes in a series such as the Cambridge Companions to Literature dedicated to science fiction, crime fiction, the Gothic novel suggest, implicitly, that such genres should be thought of in the same terms as, say, modernism, Victorian, African American, or even single‐author studies – as broad fields of inquiry, rather than stably defined sets of texts.