The Formation of the Genera in Early Modern Culture

"This collection of essays comprises a series of responses to the theme of genre in literature and visual art from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries - from the Florentine Renaissance to the French Enlightenment. They deal with Italian art and literature, with Spanish painting and literature, with the rise of the French roman and with English poetry and poetics. The essays are disparate in their themes and approaches, yet a number of common threads appear. These common threads will be familiar from the important work in genre studies of Rosalie Colie in The Resources of Kind (1973) and Alastair Fowler in Kinds of Literature (1982). A number of the essays are also informed by the work of Bakhtin, and take a 'dialogic' approach which stresses openness and elasticity in the use of genre. The leading article in the collection, by Alastair Fowler, gives a succinct overview by an authority in the field - one whose remarks on the use of genre as mode or field, rather than category, are borne out by the following essays. His article thus provides many of the lines with which the subsequent contributions work". (from the Introduction)