Romantic Genre Theory

Abstract

This chapter investigates genre theory of the ‘high’ Romantic period, taking Friedrich Schlegel's Dialogue on Poetry and Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads as paradigms of the wide-ranging debate on genre that took place in both Germany and Britain. German influence is particularly evident in theories of organic form and philosophical approaches to genre, but these in turn draw on earlier British aesthetics, notably Shaftesbury's ‘language of forms’, and undergo further elaboration by Coleridge in his ‘genial criticism’ essays and elsewhere. Goethe's concept of morphology is another important development of the organicist model, and philosophical interest in genre-systems is reflected too in German speculation on the modal triad, lyric-epic-dramatic. The chapter also highlights the sociological emphasis of British genre theory, examining the influence of the French Revolution controversy, which led to the wholesale politicization of genre evident in many 1790s genre-reform programmes. The chapter concludes with Wordsworth's Preface to Poems (1815), a text which forcibly demonstrates the opposing currents in Romantic genre theory.