ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ways in which the generic context plays its part in our developing practice of close reading; in particular the ways in which a conscious sense of the generic context of what we are reading changes the mode of attention and controls and constrains the semantic, syntactic, thematic, and iterative contexts. Each of the revenge tragedy conventions would be fairly easy to map onto the play, providing a guiding generic context for key elements of its meaning. Perhaps the clearest indication that the generic context of Greek tragedy has become interpretively operative, even as a revenge tragedy should be taking place, is Hamlet's speech in Act 5. Of all the major literary genres, the novel has the greatest possible range of generic contexts. The flexibility of the extended prose form has enabled an enormous diversity of styles and subjects: realism, historical novel, romance, fantasy, picaresque, science fiction, bildungsroman, eroticism, satire, the gothic, the comic, the postmodern, etc.
