ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the internal logic of genre as a historically specific constellation of formal, rhetorical, and thematic features. On the basis of these structural features, genres project worlds: structures of meaning which operate in texts as a set of tacit presuppositions. Grice's theory of conversational implicatures allows for the beginning of an account of how these layers of background meaning are brought into play by texts working in specific genres. Genres activate layers of lexical and encyclopedic knowledge as and when they are required in a text, and constrain our reading to those kinds of knowledge that are generically relevant. It focuses on the way different genres 'systematically form the objects of which they speak', and considers two of the 'realist' genres that have been so important in the making of world: those of philosophy and history.
