Ebook: Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship

“Genre” has classical roots: both in the etymology of the word and in the history of genre criticism in relation to English literature, which begins with Aristotle. In a similar vein, it is almost a commonplace to state that literary genres are not given or fixed entities but subjective and unstable (as well as historically situated), and that the reception of genre by both writers and scholars feeds back into the way genre is articulated in specific literary works. This volume connects the situatedness of genre in English poetry with an emphasis on the significance of developments in classical scholarship, to address the ways in which classical scholarship and English literary criticism interact, and to explore how this interaction affects, changes, sharpens, blurs, or perhaps even obstructs views on genre in English poetry. These themes—classical scholarship, literary criticism, and genre—form a triangle of key concepts for the volume, approached in different ways and with different productive results by contributors from across the fields of reception studies, English poetry, classical scholarship, and the history of scholarship and literary criticism. Covering topics from the establishment of genre in the Middle Ages to the invention of the Elizabethan epyllion in the twentieth century, and bringing together the works of English poets from Chaucer to Tennyson to Josephine Balmer, the essays collected here argue that the reception and criticism of classical texts play a crucial part in generic formation in English poetry.