Introduction

Thirty years ago, Fredric Jameson commented of genre criticism that, though ‘thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice [it] has in fact always entertained a privileged relationship with historical criticism’ (1981: 105). For Jameson, the potentially progressive political implications of this relationship derive primarily from his conviction that genre is, as his subtitle suggests, ‘a socially symbolic act’ (cf. Frow, 2005: 2, 10–19, 142–44). From this perspective, the task of genre criticism is not ‘neutrally to describe’ (Jameson, 1981: 107) the form in question but to understand it as constructing ‘a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself in the form of a “value system”’ (Jameson, 1981: 141). Jameson further insists that deviations from generic norms reveal ‘the historicity of structures’ (1981: 145) by directing attention ‘to those determinate changes in the historical situation which block a full manifestation or replication of the structure [and its “value-system”] on the discursive level’ (1981: 146). Form, then, constitutes ‘the political unconscious’ of the text and it is the politically responsible critic's role to read symptomatically for indices of its relation to social reality and the political forces which configure that reality.

Written before postcolonial literary studies as understood today had properly established itself, Jameson's ‘Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Uses of Genre Criticism’ has played little part in the often heated debate over the field's political credentials.