Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Classical standards in the period
- 2 Innovation and modernity
- 3 The French Revolution
- 4 Transcendental philosophy and Romantic criticism
- 5 Nature
- 6 Scientific models
- 7 Religion and literature
- 8 Language theory and the art of understanding
- 9 The transformation of rhetoric
- 10 Romantic irony
- 11 Theories of genre
- 12 Theory of the novel
- 13 The impact of Shakespeare
- 14 The vocation of criticism and the crisis of the republic of letters
- 15 Women, gender and literary criticism
- 16 Literary history and historicism
- 17 Literature and the other arts
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
11 - Theories of genre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Classical standards in the period
- 2 Innovation and modernity
- 3 The French Revolution
- 4 Transcendental philosophy and Romantic criticism
- 5 Nature
- 6 Scientific models
- 7 Religion and literature
- 8 Language theory and the art of understanding
- 9 The transformation of rhetoric
- 10 Romantic irony
- 11 Theories of genre
- 12 Theory of the novel
- 13 The impact of Shakespeare
- 14 The vocation of criticism and the crisis of the republic of letters
- 15 Women, gender and literary criticism
- 16 Literary history and historicism
- 17 Literature and the other arts
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
To argue for a Romantic genre theory may seem surprising. This is the period when William Wordsworth writes that every author must ‘creat[e] the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’, when Madame de Staël praises Germany as opposed to France because its authors ‘form [their] public’, and when Victor Hugo insists that writers be judged by the ‘laws of their personal organisation’ instead of ‘rules and genres’. But as Hugo indicates Romanticism may not so much reject genre as expand its provenance so that it is no longer a system of exclusion. Noting that a work's ‘defects’ are often the ‘condition of [its] qualities’ (p. 107), Hugo questions the equation of genre with achieved form. He also points to what is more systematically theorized in Germany as hermeneutics: the understanding of culturally or historically different texts through a reading that is ‘psychological’ as well as ‘grammatical’ and ‘technical’. Wilhelm Dilthey later links a specifically Romantic hermeneutics to a tradition leading from Leibniz through Goethe and Herder to the post-Kantians, one that sees ‘the shaping structure of the soul behind the appearance’ of natural and cultural phenomena. Instituting a hermeneutics of genre, romanticism replaces earlier pragmatic or formalist approaches with a phenomenological approach to genres as expressing sometimes conflicted states of (cultural) consciousness. Genres are seen not in terms of effects or structural features, but as sites of negotiation between subject and object, inwardness and its externalization, or as (in)adequate embodiments of the ‘Idea’. This essay traces the emergence of ‘philosophical genre theory’ up to its temporary consolidation by Hegel.
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- The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 226 - 249Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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