The Life Cycles of Genres

The concept of genre is as old as literary theory itself, but centuries of debate haven’t produced much consensus on the topic. Part of the reason is that genre looks like a different thing at different points in the life of a text. Scholars of rhetoric tend to focus on the patterns of communicative action that produce memoranda or tragedies (Devitt 2004; Miller 1984). Sociologists are sometimes more interested in institutions that organize reception (Bourdieu 1984; DiMaggio 1987). Literary scholars, for their part, have traditionally been preoccupied with the patterning of the texts themselves. Of course, all of these aspects of genre are connected. But it’s not easy to describe the connections. Distant reading may seem to lend itself, inevitably, to literary scholars’ fixation on genre as an attribute of textual artefacts. But the real value of quantitative methods could be that they allow scholars to coordinate textual and social approaches to genre. This essay will draw one tentative connection of that kind. It approaches genre initially as a question about the history of reception — gathering lists of titles that were grouped by particular readers or institutions at particular historical moments. But it also looks beyond those titles to the texts themselves. Contemporary practices of statistical modeling allow us to put different groups of texts into dialogue with each other, in order to discover, for instance, whether competing definitions of the Gothic (created at different times and embodied in entirely different lists of works) were nevertheless as compatible as some critics claim.