ABSTRACT
There is no agreed equivalent for this word in the vocabulary of English criticism—'kind', 'type', 'form' and 'genre' are variously used—and this fact alone indicates some of the confusions that surround the development of the theory of genres. The attempt to classify or describe literary works in terms of shared characteristics was begun by Aristotle in the Poetics, and the first sentence of his treatise suggests the two main directions genre theory was to follow:
