ABSTRACT
The theory of artistic and literary kinds and of the laws or rules proper to each separate kind has almost always followed the fortunes of the rhetorical theory. Literary compositions melt one into another like colours: and if in their stronger shades it is easy to recognize them, they are susceptible of such variety and of so many different forms that it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins. Literary thought between the late eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, that is to say from "the period of genius" to that of romanticism properly so called, rose in rebellion against separate individual rules and against all rules as such. The objectivity of literary kinds is frankly maintained by Ferdinand Brunetiere, who looks on literary history as the evolution of kinds, and gives sharply defined form to a superstition which, seldom confessed so truthfully or applied so rigorously, survives to contaminate modern literary history.
