Genre, Past and Present
Genre has traditionally been seen as a framework or series of frameworks for organizing texts (and other artworks) so they may be analyzed with some degree of precision, yet the meaning of the term has always been unstable. Disagreements arise around specific classifications, and the term has often been redefined or simply deployed, without explanation, in different ways. The novel, for instance, has been subject to numerous and diverging definitions, from (to name only a few) Gyorgy Lukacs to Mikhail Bakhtin to Ralph Rader to Priya Joshi. Such classifications, no matter how numerous, are familiar.
