Genre Theory and Historicism
Ted Underwood · Journal of Cultural Analytics · 2016
Genre is a word whose time has come — and gone — and might now, perhaps, be coming back again. Debates about particular literary kinds have been com-mon in literary criticism since Aristotle’s Poetics, but they acquired a new intensity and reflexivity in the third quarter of the twentieth century, as structuralists and poststructuralists struggled to redefine the concept of genre itself.