ABSTRACT
The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things — but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty, though the round it were crowded as full as they could hold. Genre is so basic to our notions of what literature is that, as Terence Hawkes has put it, “a world without a theory of genre is unthinkable, and untrue to experience.” Genre study in the United States and Great Britain really came into its own as auteurism waned and the structuralist star rose in the early 1970s. Today, although the empiricism of much of modern science protects the biologist from self-doubt, the literary theorist finds it increasingly difficult to hold to the notion that a literary genre is a “thing” or that genre study is merely the disinterested mapping of the literary world.
