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1 results

  • 22 - The epigenesis of genre: new forms from old

  • from Part III - Histories: Writing in the New Movements
  • Edited by James Chandler
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
    Published online:
    28 May 2009
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 507-526

  • Summary

    Discarding the 'classical' theory of genre, Friedrich Schlegel wrote provocatively that there is only one genre or as many genres as texts. The cultural discipline subtended by the system of genres was in flux by the Romantic period. This chapter focuses on three generic radicals that are distributed across the formal divisions between prose, poetry and non-fiction prose: extensive genres; intensive genres; and genres-in-progress. The word genre is also connected to 'gender' and 'engendering'. In this period 'epigenesis' gradually replaced 'preformation' as an account of how organisms develop. Epigenesis, as a result, became an account not just of how an organism develops but also of the emergence of new species. The impact of the development of the embryo is evident in Hegel, who worked on both natural history and art. The novelizing other extensive genres allows poetry to be removed from its current esotericism and seen as producing the novel.