The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After Author(s): Alastair Fowler Source: New Literary History, Vol.

34, No. 2, Theorizing Genres I (Spring, 2003), pp. 185-200 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057775 . Accessed: 19/02/2014 14:11
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The

Formation Renaissance

in the of Genres and After

Alastair Fowler
title may seem to imply thatmany genres originated in the historical Renaissance. And it is true that the early modern context made possible the revival of several ancient genres and the fresh invention of new ones. Explorations and new world discover ies, for example, stimulated a return to classical georgic, which appealed to the appetite for practical information on the one hand and on the of a print other for images of exotic places. Again, the development culture was a prerequisite for several important kinds. The For the most part, however, "formation" may be misleading.
Renaissance was not

This

to them a new spirit. The majority of by adapting old forms or imparting the principal kinds had already been available in theMiddle Ages. Most
Renaissance innovations were not

always

characterized

by

new

forms;

often

itworked

an instructional or informative given new labels. Thus, classical georgic, a genre written inpersona auctoris, had shadowy existence in theMiddle Ages as one of the three generic realms of the rota Vergiliana. It also thrived under the disguise of prologue, a dominant medieval form; and there were georgic sonnets long before Luigi Alamanni's La Cultivazione Soneti dei Mesi were composed (1546). Fulgore da San Gimignano's between 1309 and 1317.1 Again, comedies and tragedies were common
before the Renaissance,

totally

new,

even

when

they

were

in St. Isidore's definition "begins with Comedy sorrowful material, namely Hell, and ends with gladness, namely with Paradise and the divine being."2 But, in the new historical or external tractatus or kinds changed profoundly. The context, these medieval famous Dialogo of 1632, a treatise is a significant example. Galileo's and Ptolemaic world systems, is cast in a treatise on the Copernican dialectic form: this had the great advantage of avoiding dangerous rather than drama.
commitments in a

although

differently

conceived,

as

narrative

works presenting pro and con positions or opposite perspectives, like LAllegro and IlPenseroso. A key medieval genre was the epistle, used as an
instrument meeting of very government social different at a distance. was But often the Renaissance or epistle, intimate, or needs, informal,

repressive,

ideological

age.

So,

too,

with

pendent

New Literary History, 2003, 34: 185-200

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186

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newsy, or given to satiric parody like the Epistulae Obscurorum Virorum (1515-16). On 25 July 1625, in one of his Familiar Letters,James Howell listed five types of letter: "letters, though they be capable of any subject,
yet are commonly they or tory, congratulatory."3 either narratory, objurgatory, consolatory, moni

The mention
revived

of comedy and
the Renaissance

tragedy is a reminder
were to be "pure"

that the ancient

forms of what was

theorists. Was Ariosto's Orlando about genre by Italian Renaissance Furioso true epic or not? The theorists, even the broad-minded Bishop Min turno, tended to take a Scholastic path and to be more concerned with defining vague entities and invented categories than with describ

alleged to have been adulterated in theMiddle Ages (that is,modified to counteract their paganism). Paganism was now felt to be no longer a so treatments of genre could be followed that ancient rhetorical danger, some to This led freely. interesting but much dull theoretical debate

genres

in

ing kinds actually practiced. J. C. Scaliger's great Poetice (1561) is a grand It reflects remarkable progress towards useful genre criti exception. cism, giving detailed descriptions of kinds, based on rhetorical dispositio. a new genre had no ancient Occasionally, precedent, so that one had to be faked. The "poetics" genre was invented on the basis of only a very
ancient exemplars, notably Aristotle's. But soon so many Renais

few

sance imitations and commentaries thronged the scene that itbecame a was basis Its the novel social activity of literary criticism. lively genre. This new grasp of genre was obviously arrived at through humanistic closer study of the best ancient authors. education, which encouraged the difference was the specific method Less obviously, what made of the better grammar schools, likeWinchester education: College, gave instruction in creative writing. That is to say, exercises in Latin verse verse genres such as epitaph, elegy, and especially gathering of short meant his Poematum Liber (1573) to give Win Wills Richard epigram. chester boys models for their composition exercises. The epigram, for a distinctive precision. The interest of epigram arose practiced with from its low status, beneath the notice of ancient theorists. This at first allowed it to be practiced more freely. But that could not be allowed to complicate simple matters. Thomas S?billet professed to pin down the correct structure for epigrams and sonnets; prescribing (to name but one folly) just where the "points" (witty turns) of an epigram-sonnet should be placed.4 The silva or miscellany became a dominant form in manuscript circulation and later in print too.5A good example isRobert come over fromNew Britaniola. Epigrams and other Hayman's Quodlibets, lately small parcels. . . (1628). "Quodlibet"?whatever you like; what you will?
go unopposed by French theorists, eager as always to regulate and example, was of course a common medieval form, but it now came to be composition. Every schoolboy learnt the form silva, a sequence or

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OF

GENRES

187
term, as yet nonexistent, for silva; just as "parcels"

adumbrates

a critical

was

is a trope for the non-epigrams in themiscellany. (Almost always a form term earlier the for than critical Another collective metaphor it.) appears The
"posy" or "nosegay," applicable not only to emblems but to any anthology.

printing of the Planudean Anthology, rather than that of the Appendix Vergiliana or the Anthologia Latina,6 which marks the flowering of the readers and poets. Soon epigram genre for the majority of Renaissance there were so many anthologies that I can only gesture to bibliographies of early exemplars, such as Arthur Case's English Poetical Miscellanies and
John

anthology, a genre we take for granted, depends heavily on the medium. in the second True, the term was used by Diogenianus print the And Greek Anthology had existed inmanuscript only, from century. about 900 ce. Its fullest form, the Palatine Anthology (not widely known until after 1606) did not appear in print until the nineteenth century. But a substantial part of it, the Planudean Anthology (gathered in 1301), was printed in 1494 and edited by Henri Estienne in 1556. And it is this

Surveying the new and the new-old genres of the Renaissance period, one cannot but think that many of them arose from changed social
circumstances. Thus, the estate poem (country-house poem) seems to

Sparrow's

"Renaissance

Latin

Poetry."7

have emerged in response to changes in the character of hospitality. The decline of "housekeeping" was so critical that satiric comments grew is noticeably frequent, and new topoi became recognizable. Dialogue another instance: informal debate became more common than would have been usual in theMiddle Ages. Again, the development of literary
coteries and new forms of

century genre of critical elegy, a subgenre distinct from epitaph, epicede, and personal funeral elegy. The occasionality of the critical the death elegy focussed on a notional, imaginary ceremony mourning of an admired poet. But the actual occasion was often the printing of a volume of similar critical elegies, like theJusta Eduardo King Naufrago, ab amicis moerentibus . . . (Cambridge, 1638) for Edward King, or the similar collection for Donne to his 1633 Poems; although appended single critical elegies are of course also found, like Ben Jonson's "To the ..." (whose occasion was the printing of the Memory of My Beloved Shakespeare First Folio of 1623). Poets' elegies like Thomas Carew's "An Elegie upon the Death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr John Donne" not only allude to the poetry of the deceased, but may also use their style, as in the hommage or tombeau.8 And sometimes the mourning is for the art of William Dunbar's Lament for the poetry itself, as in Carew's elegy and in Makaris (ca. 1505). In the formation of kinds, it seems usual for subgenres to emerge before genres. If this appears counterintuitive, one has only to reflect that particulars are identified before generalities. We see trees before we

patronage

made

possible

the

seventeenth

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see the wood they are parts of. This is particularly obvious with the genres of visual art. In painting, the flowerpiece, breakfast piece, and so forth, appeared before the category "still life"; the doorkijke appeared before the interior; the journey and the world landscape before the landscape in general; and the brothel scene, the guardroom, themerry company and the conversation piece before the "genre" category (a term not used until the nineteenth century) .9 At first there is no name for the broader
label

type, only for the particular

no argument against

"subject." The
the genre's

absence

of a

for more than all, the architectural orders themselves went unnamed 1500 years.10 Even the emblem was not at first identified by name; Andrea Alciato himself seems to have thought of it as a special sort of can almost see the epigram part of the emblem emerge epigram.11 One in an epigrammatic poem by Bonaventura Peeters on his own painting: his associative thought makes the poem virtually a nude emblem.12 What crystallized the familiar emblem form of motto, pictura, inscriptio (epi gram), and descriptions probably the print format. Indeed, long before
Alciato, which itmade sometimes an almost incorporated the appearance complete a motto a and in the quotation.13 printer's device,

genre

is of course

existence;

after

In literature, similarly, poems

as such

of country life were commonly named include

landscape, or georgic, became usual.14

the calendar (as in Spenser's subgenres or and the Cantos Calender Mutabilitie); of time-of-day (a sort Shepheardes as in Charles Cotton's Morning Quatrains or Nicholas of almanac, Breton's Fantasticks). Breton's Preface calls what he is doing "description of the twelve houres, the twelvemoneths, and some speciall dayes in the was "a peece yere," and (disclaiming originality) tells how his inspiration set down upon an of paper, in which I found a kind of discourse, imagination ofmidnight," which he wished to emulate.15 Robert Herrick's country festivals and transshiftings are in a similar vein. All the works just seems to mentioned probably reflect the rethinking of temporality that the age. And all show influence of the visual arts, in have preoccupied were extremely common, from the which calendrical programmes Other Renaissance Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. a genre, an important part was regular metaphors or synecdo
culinary metaphors were

long

before

terms

During the process of conceptualizing played by metaphors. Many genres had

ches associated with them. Among

these,

particularly prominent, in view of the highly developed analogy between eating and talking, not only in "table talk" but in criticism of all sorts.16 names from the kitchen: satura; farrago; Many literary genres drew their mention sal and mel epigram?to only the best known. To the many Gilbert and in Michel Highet, one might add two: Jeanneret examples The Wit's Album, orPine-apple ofLiterature... (1829) and Philofunniculus's

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FORMATION

OF GENRES

189

Duns

A New Oxford Sausage, Spiced toSuit theTaste ofTown and Gown, Dons and (1844). As their metaphors died, identifying the genres became
easier and more conscious.

Claudio
manuals,

Guillen
for

has shown how genres were moulded

letter-writing manuals.17 And

by composition
another

source
Parnassum,

of genre
one

example

topoi
of many

and

associations
thesauri.

was
From

Paul

Aler's

Gradus
one

popular

ad

similar

the Gradus

for example, that syrma and cothurnus can be put for tragedy or any poem of high seriousness: that is, the trailing robe and the buskin, used ad maiestatem, for dignity. Literary references follow: to Juvenal ("the and Martial ("nor does my Muse trailing robe of Thyestes or Antigone") swell with frenzied tragic strain," insano syrma). A particurly interesting citation isOvid's Amores, a work well known toMilton, which personifies
several genres:

learns,

Whilst work

in woodland I was strolling here enveloped shadows, asking myself what should venture I on, came Elegy with coil of odorous locks, and, my Muse a than its mate.19 She had form: her robe was think, one foot longer comely to face suffused with added love, and the fault in her carriage gauzy light, her grace. a There came, brow, and too, her with mighty stride: locks raging Tragedy, her left hand her pall trailed on the ground; swayed on her foot was the buskin.20 Lydian high-bound

her

darkling o'erhung a wide kingly sceptre,

Elegy's coil or knot "of odorous locks," odoratosElegeia nexa capillos, surely reappears inMilton's elegy for Edward King as "the tangle of Neaera's
hair." Milton asks "What boots

of serious poetry. shade, / Or with than a rhetorical

elegies, and more ment?' of about 1635.

In such metaphors

"Were itnot better . . ./ To sport with Amaryllis in the the tangles of Neaera's hair?"21 The question ismore one: he himself had ten years earlier written Latin love recently had rejected them in the retraction "Haec ego
the mood of a genre is cultivated, meditated,

it / To

. . . meditate

the

thankless

muse"

can be of value to an interpreter. A good instance perhaps modified; this is Aeneid I 336-7, where Venus tells her son Aeneas "Tyrian maids are wont to wear the quiver, and bind their ankles high with the purple
buskin."

buskined the gift of tragedy. In the same book, Aeneas brings Dido Ilione's sceptrum (I 653). The tropic attributes of tragedy?purple buskin and sceptre?thus combine together in a dramatic irony foreshadowing
Dido's

Very

soon

after,

Dido

is named?and

so

associated

with

It is time to look in more detail at how genre works in practice. Consider Melibceus's lines opening Virgil's First Eclogue: "Tityre, tu One
patulae recubans sub

tragic

end.

is to imagine Tityrus as meditating

tegmine fagi/

silvestrem

tenui musam

meditaris

avena."22

his woodland

Muse

on slender

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HISTORY

reed. Such formulas have been described as coded; everyone knows to decode avena ("reed") as pastoral song. But weren't early pastoral idyls if not for Virgil, accompanied on actual and eclogues, for Theocritus reed pipes? And, if so, should we not think of the avena as a part of the
external situation, the context of utterance? Genres are

as virtual contexts: as providing for the individual work a understood context equivalent to the pragmatic context of speech. Abandoning the notion of genres as fixed classes, criticism moved on in the 1980s and 1990s to discussing them as coded structures or matrices for composi tion and interpretation. Perhaps now it is time tomove on again, and to think of genres as fields of association like those in actual situations of
utterance.

coming

to be

Codes have indeed their parts to play in the reception of every literary as I stressed (and probably overstressed) in Kinds of Literature (1982). Ordinary speech has its codes too. But, just as in speech itself are taken up through inferences drawn from meanings assumptions work,
shared with the

where

to be the speaker is often absent, the finer meanings need inferred from the shared literary (not least generic) contexts. We may be too ready to assume coded signals. The general case is that of an untutored readership with little knowledge of literary codes?an audi ence, say, that has heard shepherds' pipes and read a few poems but knows little of subgenres
Genres seem

speaker

about

pragmatic

contexts,

so

too

in literature,

and modes.
more

to differentiate,

or

less

to tion of features, both formal and substantive, ranging from minute to elusive from moods.23 This specific topics repertoire may large, include characteristic diction, favorite rhetorical figures, peculiar meters, more or less principal subjects, and typical themes. Each genre has to material has be the for which found writer. The by obligatory topics, a of for lead retirement, poet back to example, may georgic topic Seneca's Ep?stola XC. Such shared sources draw exemplars of the genre a in together and adumbrate for reader the broad field of associations which themost relevant ones are to be found. One may usefully think of genres as domains of association?specialized, literary equivalents of the is communicated in ordinary fields of association whereby meaning a set the reader's and As mental such, genres adjust help in speech.
selecting of the the literary associative Genre's optimally work.24 relevant associations that amount to a meaning in the

systematically,

a combina

function

can

be

attributes or conventional
First Eclogue, tenui musam

tropes of the kind. In the verses from Virgil's

meditaris avena calls up associations and

clearly

seen

at

work

(literary and extraliterary) connected with the outside assumptions world of shepherds and country song, and with the literary world of

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FORMATION

OF

GENRES

191
of the Aeneid ("I who
of Mars's bristling

pastoral poetry. In the rejected opening

tuned

is obviously self-referring, the poet's attribute as much as the It is "thin" because the lowly mode of pastoral properly shepherd's. requires a stylus tenuis. Since Virgil, generations of poets have deployed similar metaphors. Spenser's Cuddy complains "I haue pyped erst so long with payne, / That all mine Oten reedes bene rent and wore";25 and when Spenser wishes to announce that his poem has cracked themould of pastoral, he writes that Colin (the poet's persona) "broke his oaten reed
pype."26 deal"; he, Shakespeare, too, has too, shepherds complains piping can sound "My shepherd's pipe on humble "oaten straws"27?just no as,

my

song

on

a thin

reed

...

now

formerly
the

sing

arms"),

I tune."29And, beneath John Greenleaf reed once more /Well-pleased, Whittier's bust, more vaguely, is inscribed "Making his rustic reed of in the war with wrong." song / A weapon is well trodden; but itmay be less widely This pastoral landscape
known most that other genres, genre too, metaphors have prominent metaphoric were already attributes. consciously Some of the recognized

to the oaten in Lycidas, "the rural ditties were not mute / Tempered flute." Milton occasionally makes the genre association explicit: "pastoral reed with oaten stops"; "Arcadian pipe, the pastoral reed."28 In 1730, James Thomson, both Virgilian and Miltonic, can still claim "The Doric

by the ancients; others accrued Table 1.

Trope Genre

in the Renaissance

(see table 1):

Locus

classicus

POETRY COMEDY TRAGEDY

cicada

cygnus soccus (sock) cothurnus (buskin) palla, sceptrum drum, ejulations avena (reed) arvum (field) tuba (trumpet) lyra (lyre) mel (honey), sal (salt) fel (gall), acetum (vinegar)

Plato, Phaedrus 258e on Alciato Mignault

clxxx

PASTORAL GEORGIC EPIC ODE EPIGRAM

Horace, Epistlesll i 174 Satires I v 64 Horace, 13 Ovid,Amor??$IIIill Milton, R Penseroso 97-8 Donne, Sermons? iii271 Virgil, Aeneid i la Virgil, Aeneid i le Martial, VIII iii 22 Horace, Odes I vi 10 Martial, XII xciv 5 Scaliger, Poeticelll exxii

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192
One notices that mel, acetum, and the others are

NEW

LITERARY

HISTORY

not

labels classifying epigram types. For the imagery of the poem itself is to a corresponding register. Katherine Wilson draws likely to belong to Ovid of Shakespeare attention to Francis Meres's in comparison Palladis Tamia (1598): "the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives inmellifluous
and she honey-tongued points out, Shakespeare, "was often sugared witness used by . . . his the sugared sonneteers sonnets."31 of their As love

merely

taxonomic

"No other talk": "sugared speech and siren's song" (Thomas Watson); to of "Oh talk! Wherewith try" (Philip Sidney); sugaring speech sugared my thoughts do live" (Giles Fletcher). Wilson defines sugared as "sweet ened by artifice," a sung or lyric quality: "the sugared quality is a sort of sweetness and honey more probably wit." But "wit"may be misleading; an In erotic charge. Sidney, kisses are sweet, and breath, and imply ladies. The statistics of sweetare surprising. In Astrophel and Stella, mostly
mel

includes
further fifty-five

epigram-sonnets,

sweet

occurs

no

fewer

than

the Other

Sonnets,
In

six occurrences. times.

the total rises to sixty-seven. Sugared adds a

Shakespeare's Sonnets, similarly, sweet occurs

fifty

times;

if one

From an early date, such associations as these fused with the enduring of history and Clio, for example, Muse symbolism of the Muses. sometimes epic, had as attributes the trumpet and the laurel wreath or
Chaucer knows the

crown.

ment
/ In

in The House
trumpe, beme,

ofFame; his account

and claryoun"

trumpet's

association

with

heroic

achieve

of "hem thatmaken
as many as eight

blody soun
references

contains

to the instrument

assigned musical symbolism. In the seventeenth

and its corresponding

in twelve lines.32 Several other Muses were also instruments, which became part of a network of genre century, the system of symbolic modes
culminated in cosmic summas instrumentarium

like Fr. Athanasius Kircher's MusurgiaP In the Middle Ages, the three major modes were schematized and in the so-called rota Vergiliana (see through genre metaphors expanded This table 1 and 2). enormously influential diagram, popularised figure associates of Garland, pastoral with otiosus pastor, sheep, crook, by John tree. beech and Georgic is comparably linked with farmer, ox, pasture, and fruit tree; and epic, with miles dominons (knight), plough, field,
horse, sword,

and poets were able to use the medieval Sophisticated in allusions of great economy. So, inMilton's ancient genre metaphors "Then to the well-trod stage anon / IfJonson's learned sock be on," the Renaissance
reference is clear without the word

city

and

camp,

laurel

of

victory

and

cedar

of

status.

or bling strings" of lyric hymn.34And Joseph Hall, whose "scornful Muse" cannot abide "with tragic shoes her ankles for to hide," nor to write ("trencher poetry"), nor to "speak rhymes unto my poems of patronage

"comedy."

Similarly

with

the

"trem

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FORMATION

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193

j^ascoft _bacu[us_,

^Pastor ohos^^ Fig. 1. The Wheel 1962), p. 87. of Virgil. From Edmond Faral, Les Arts po?tiques de 12 etde 13" si?cle (Paris,

Table 2. The Wheel ofVirgil, expressed in tabularform

Epic Pastoral Georgic

STYLE CADRE NAME ANIMAL TOOL LOCALE TREE

gravis stylus miles dominans Hector;

equus

humilis
pastor ovis baculus pascua

stylus
otiosus

mediocris

Ajax

Tityrus; Melibceus

stylus agr?cola Triptolemus; Ccelius bos

aratrum ager

gladius
urbs; laurus; castrum cedrus

fagus

pomus

oaten minstrelsy," announces

series of other genre associations:

his preference
"Trumpet, invocation, counts

for satire by rejecting a

and reeds, and socks, and

buskins fine / I them bequeath."35

Satire, in ancient ing," and a genre that called literature?unless "scornful." But one

for no

Renaissance

an attribute scarcely like epithets "biting," "pierc satire several acquired tropic had

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194
attributes:
rather than

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HISTORY

the shaggy satyr from false etymology of satire from satyr

satura; the whip of "corrected" abuses; and, in Marston, the

was particularly biting dog of cynic-ism?6 The whipping metaphor common as a disguise around 1600, when satires were being burnt by the anonymous The the hangman. Among many one may mention the The Satire Satire and the and (both 1601) Whipping of Whipper of Breton's No Whipping, nor Tripping, But a Kind Friendly Snipping (also was supplemented in the Similarly, the georgic farmer's equipment Renaissance with a goad;37 as when Michael Drayton boasts about the variety of the Fourteenth Song of Poly-Olbion:
As Poor Then to the varying Sheep-hook in a buskined Earth and the Muse Goad, doth her apply, times doth bound.38

1601).

plain strain she

she many instantly doth

sound:

In his elegy on Donne, Henry King associates the funeral elegy genre with a solemn passing bell: "Oh! Hadst thou in an Elegiac knell / Rung out unto the world thine own Farewell."39 And in his "Elegy Written in a same asso Country Churchyard," Thomas Gray famously develops the ciation: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." He probably itwith an echo of Milton's "I hear the far-off curfew sound complicates solemn counter / Swinging slow with sullen [melancholy] roar"?the of bells"40?and in II Penseroso certainly (as he LAllegros "merry part acknowledged
lines 5-6, where

to Bedingfield)
"from afar

he follows Dante's
. . . seems

a bell

Purgatorio Canto
the dying

8,

to mourn

ilgiorno pianger che si more). Milton's pendant (squilla di lontano / chepaia modes and moods form an emotional and experiential polarity as well as
a contrast of genres.

day"

but with musical semiotics, mural painting, contemporary music and musical theory, allegory, prosody, and iconography.41 All thismay suggest call up an entire world, or at least all of it that is that genre metaphors or mode. Doubtless this is to representation in a single genre susceptible so potentially. But the genre ambiences invoked have a limited number of focuses. And it is to these in the first instance that the tropes of
invocation The gesture. ambience, the for example, the pastoral genre's the mental "set," may the occupa be

Something of the complexity of association involved in genres may be fine account of the trumpet in baroque glimpsed from James Jensen's literature. It has connections not only with martial and heroic contexts

evoked by a distinct constellation

the oasis-pleasance,

of interrelated metaphoric
river, sheep-hook,

properties:

sedge-fringed

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a great many others.42 The oasis guarantees that

tions

of

otium,

and

not

otium is unlikely to be interrupted. And the reed raises the subject of poetry itself, the self-referential topic ofmuch pastoral poetry. Naturally,
these

Thus, for his choice of pastoral river,Virgil returns to his own native In Eclogues VII, "Mincius fringes his green locality and the riverMincio. banks with waving reeds," and in the survey of poetic themes that opens Georgics III he promises a temple "beside the water, where great Mincius wanders in slow windings and fringes his banks with slender reeds" {et the river be After Jacopo Sannazaro, te?era praetexit harudine ripas) .43
came a more

metaphors

soon

became

autobiographically

over-determined.

poetry: Edmund Spenser makes much of his "sweet Thames," Michael to Virgil's river Drayton of "sweet Ankor." In Lycidas, Milton alludes
more

prominent

element

in Renaissance

pastoral

and

love

now as Arethuse or Mincius. His "somewhat loudly sweep Hippocrene, his the string" (17) prepares for a high lyric or hymnal passage; transition is to This last the Latin pastoral mode. "Mincius" returns
confirmed in the next verse: "But now

flood, / Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds, / That strain I heard was of a higher mood" (85-7). As often, the tropic pastoral river is the river of poetry, the ever-changing stream that flows now as Alph or

openly,

with

self-conscious,

parados-like

effect:

"thou

honoured

the Mincius signal a return after the higher modulation. This does not mean thatMincius is invariably coded as an indicator. It
can

my

oat

proceeds."

The

reeds

of

relations with previous pastoral poetry and with Virgil; the latter's life stream, which sprang from a neighbouring fountain; the waters that ended Edward King's life; and much else besides. In other words, genre
metaphors indicators. often function as associative contexts rather than mere

carry many

complex

associations?suggesting,

for

example,

Milton's

The potential complexity of associations can be glimpsed even in the work of quite minor poets. Probably written in the 1640s, "The Vote," by the Spenserian Ralph Knevet, draws motifs from Virgil's Georgics and from Isaiah 2:4:

The And

helmet hilts

now

an hive

for bees serve

becomes, looms;

of swords may Sharp Teeth

for spiders'

pikes may make for a rake; blade, the arch-enemy of life,

And

the keen The

Shall be degraded to a pruning knife;

rustic Which spade, first was made

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196
For honest agriculture, employment, rampires trenches shall and retake forsake steep

NEW

LITERARY

HISTORY

Its primitive The And

[ramparts] deep.44

One
or

in a different poem, the contrast of "blade" and to signal epic and georgic, "pruning-knife" might have been used simply can
to modulate from the one to the other. But, even then, the

see how,

obvious here would surely not have been extraliterary associations a of into world specialized conventions. After the altogether abstracted battles of the Civil War, real weapons were dug up by farmers who had not necessarily read Virgil's Georgics. Interaction of politics with the literaryworld is specially evident with the Renaissance the emblem genre. During emblematic objects and their meanings were at first mostly ancient, like the originally warlike aureus of the Emperor Titus, which became dolphin and anchor from an the device of the printer Aldus. But before long theywere given modern
applications; prince who his arrow, The Alciato already seeks his subjects' similarly, French the Titus's replaced safety. In modernized archer might generated become a great festina lente motto of with with or a versions a Cupid crossbowman novel

emblem sabres of 1789 and the revolutionary notably the bourgeois sabres of the following decade. Mayors, judges, and minor officials all carried a sword then, as a sign of office and symbol of nobility. The revolutionary sabre was often bought privately, and engraved either by or on the maker's initiative. G?rard Sabatier, who private commission has studied the emblem sabres in considerable detail, shows that the
armourers used two main sources of

gunner.

revolution

many

emblems,

the human body or heraldic images ultimately derived from the bestiaries; sometimes they used Cesare Ripa's Iconolog?a (Rome, 1593), which was still being enlarged and reprinted in the eighteenth century. Or, new or revolutionary, might be invented, involving allegories, Masonic or the eye and pyramid, of the scales justice, the fasces of unity, perhaps as in the dollar bill. The liberty cap might surmount a helmet, or be
raised on a tree of liberty.

imagery.45

Sometimes

they

drew

on

to function in modern literature but continue metaphors in are less there overtly. Particularly complex, mixed deployed usually Genre
works,

Readers
they are

they

serve

to

re-establish

or

maintain

of novels may not think they need genre metaphors

reading a novel. to But indicate the perhaps metaphors some particular are often subgenre

generic

ambience.

to tell them
introduced of novel.

nevertheless,

Attributes or associations

of the novel

(suitably literalistic, even transpar

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FORMATION

OF

GENRES

197

ent)
Again,

include
modern

graphical
(a rapist,

autobio letters and letter-writing; diaries; notebooks; a novel. not of and unfinished drafts, impossibly journals;
novels or a are sometimes presented Doubtless, as the nobody).46 letters diary sometimes of someone allude to

and the genre's originary variant, the epistolary novel of Richardson an the letter More Smollet. implies intimacy?once, generally, however, At critical of that of than Richardson's stages speech. intimacy greater Pamela and his Clarissa, writing a letter or journal figures prominently in the action. In the romantic,
a

perhaps,

and

still in the Victorian

was a valuable

novel,
association;

the

emotional

commitment

letter

to intimacy inWilkie Collins's Basil actually leads to a the approach may concluding section entirely in epistolary form. In realistic novels, it status of letters or official records that is more be the documentary as a genre indicator. Or, it may be the occupation of writing. prominent Thus, in The New Grub Street and in The Private Papers ofHenry Rycroft, George Gissing writes about what he knows?writing.
Genre

represented

men garde novels of the twentieth century. All the associations just an tioned may still be operative, together often with implication that the Novels may be deprecatingly
such," even when they are pages presented are mere jottings?"papers," "notes," or tale and the like.47

metaphors

are

nowhere

more

actively

explored

than

in avant

titled "Chronicles"
actually in chronicle

or "A Tale

of Such and
form.48 Or, an

not

espionage novel will be called something like The IpcressFile, where "file," however, does not merely suggest an early draft or the raw material of fiction. It is associated specifically with classified information, confiden or closed society. tiality leaks, and the open
The scious, writing metaphor or "self-begetting" is most novels: in prominent self-referring, in "metafiction."49 This self-con genre or

with James Merrill's The Diblos Notebook (1965), Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook (1972), and Lawrence Durrell's Black Book (1973). The culmina tion or reductio of this tendency may be found in Robert Grudin's of thoughtful Book: A Novel (1992), where every stage of writing?and to and been assimilated pulping?has editing, publication, bookselling,
the fiction. To

subgenre has commonly been related to that seminal antecedent of Sterne's Tristram Shandy: a work that itself novel genres, Laurence introduces, more than once, the metaphor of autobiographical writing. self-references sometimes work their way into the titles; as Comparable

much

of their point. What matters is the associations they prompt. Even the so, they only indicate more or less relevant fields of association;
relevant associations?the meaning?depends less on codes

regard

such

genre

metaphors

as

encoding

would

miss

optimally

and conventions than on the individual handling: on what new depar tures the shared associations and formal shaping allow to be taken up.

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198
in postmodern the writing metaphor has turned in on literature itself, or By contrast, the trumpet of epic used outside world: to a city not primarily
Comparing genre metaphors can be

NEW

LITERARY

HISTORY

instructive.

The

metafiction may suggest how far it at least on the literary community. to refer to themartial music of the concerned with literature. University of Edinburgh

prominence

of

NOTES
Innamorati 1 Arte delta Caceta, ed. Giuliano (Milan, 1965); see Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory,History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski 1986); (Cambridge, Mass., Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources ofKind: Genre-Theory in tJie Renaissance (Berkeley, 1973). See R. D. S. Jack, Patterns of Divine Comedy: A Study of Medieval 2 English Drama 1989), pp. 1-10. (Cambridge, ed. O. J. Smeaton, 3 vols. (London, Familiar Letters, orEpistolae Ho-Elianae, "Notes 1, p. 2; compare Erasmus Newsletter, (1976), 28, and Claudio Guillen, Letter" in Renaissance Genres, ed. Lewalski, pp. 71-3, Study of the Renaissance 3 4 1902), vol. toward the 75-6.

Art po?tique Jran?oyse (Paris, 1548), fol. 39r-44v. in Jonson's The Forres''," in Poetic Traditions 5 See Alastair Fowler, "The Silva Tradition of ed. Maynard Mack and George the deForest Lord (New Haven, 1982), English Renaissance, pp. 163-80. 6 Begun 1729. perhaps in the early ninth century, frequently modified, and not printed until

7 Arthur E. Case, A Bibliography ofEnglish Poetical Miscellanies 1521-1750 (Oxford, 1935) ; Latin Poetry: Some Sixteenth-Century Latin Anthologies," in John Sparrow, "Renaissance ed. C. H. Clough Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance, (Manchester, 1976). Among Delitiae CC. Italorum Poetarum, 2 vols. may be mentioned many anthologies epigram (Frankfurt, 1608); Delitiae G Poetarum Gallorum, 3 vols. (Frankfurt, 1609); Delitiae Poetarum Germanorum, 6 vols. (Frankfurt, 1612) containing about 250,000 poems; Delitiae C. Poetarum Belgicorum, 3 vols. (Frankfurt, 1614) (all ed. by Jean Gruter); Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum, ed.

Arthur Robert

ed. (Amsterdam, 1637); Enchiridium Epigrammatum Johnston Latino-Anglicum, Vilvain 2 vols. 1654); Delitiae Poetarum Danorum, ed. Friedrich Rostgaard, (London, The Epigram in theEnglish Renaissance Hudson, 1693). See also Hoyt Hopewell (Leiden, (New York, 1966), p. 24 n 3. Thomas

8 9

Renaissance pp. 1-31.

(London, 1876). Thynne, Embl?mes and Epigrames [1600], ed. F. J. Furnivall O. Goedde, 12 See Lawrence Tempest and Shipwreck inDutch and Flemish Art: Convention, Peeters's 1989), pp. 128-9, quoting Rhetoric, and Interpretation (University Park, Penn., The Emblem poem on his own Ships in a Tempest On the naked emblem, see John Manning, 2002), p. 18. (London, as a Literary Genre," in Deviceful Settings: The English 13 See Alastair Fowler, "The Emblem Emblem and Its Contexts, ed. Michael Bath and Daniel Russell (New York, 1999),

Carew, The Poems, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford, 1957), p. 74. See Judikje Kiers and Fieke Tissink, The Glory of theGolden Age, exhibition catalogue (Amsterdam, 2000), p. 169. The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Bearers of 10 See John Onians, Middle Ages, Meaning: and the Renaissance (Princeton, 1988), p. 3. and epigram; emblem 11 Many Francis associated see, for example, (or confused)

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FORMATION OF GENRES
14

199

(Chicago, Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Princeton, 1962). "Notes toward 17 See Barbara K. Lewalski, Renaissances Genres, ed. Lewalski, pp. 70-101. 18 19 20 21 22 23

in theArts See Jay Apple ton, The Symbolism ofHabitat: An Interpretation of Landscape (Seattle, 1991). 15 Nicholas Breton, Fantasticks Serving for a Perpetuall Prognostication [1626], in The Works, ed. Ursula Kentish-Wright, 2 vols. (London, 1929), vol. 1, p. 4. tr. 16 See Michel Jeanneret, A Feast ofWords: Banquets and Table Talk in theRenaissance, 1991); Gilbert Highet, the Study The Anatomy of Satire Letter,"

of the Renaissance

in

1999). Virgil, Eclogues, in Virgil, tr.H. Rush ton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes 1982), ch. 4. (Cambridge, Mass., 24 See Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Cam

1680 onward. Thirty-two editions in the British Library, from Cologne verses alternate. In the elegiac metre, hexameter and pentameter Ovid, Amores, tr.Grant Showerman 1963), ffl.I.11-14, p. 445. (Cambridge, Mass., Milton, Lycidas, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. J. Carey (London, 1997), lines 67-69.

to signal the Virgilian allusion. line 8; January, line 72. 1579), October, Shepheardes Calender (London, For the "humility" 27 The Passionate Pilgrim 7.17; Love's Labour's Lost 5.2.893. (stylus "An Eglogue upon the Death of.. .Walsingham humilis) of the oaten reed, see Thomas Watson, . . . ," "An humble stile befits a shall pipe but on an oaten quill": simple Swaine / My Muse The XV Bookes of P. Poems, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1895), p. 163; Arthur Golding, . . . (London, Ovidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis, Translated 1567), vol. 1, p. 842, "Oten 26 Reede." 28 Fowler Cornus 344; Paradise (Harlow, Lost xi 132, in The Poems of John Milton, [1730] lines 3-4, ed. John Carey and Alastair

1986). bridge, Mass., 25 Glossed by E. K. as avena

1968). Autumn 29 James Thomson, Bertram Dobell (Cambridge, 30 John Donne, 1953-62). 31 Katherine 32 The House

in The Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley,

1994). Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter

and Evelyn M.

33 Musurgia Instruments and Their Symbolism inWestern Art (London, Winternitz, Musical 1967). 34 L'Allegro 131-2; // Penseroso 106-7. Compare Michael "The Sacrifice to Drayton, line 50, "Or in the Sock, or in the Buskined Apollo," Strayne." 35 Joseph Hall, "Satire I," Virgidemiae (London, 1598) lines 9-20. The tropic legacy is The Scourge of Villanie. Three [that is, gelder of dogs] Kinsayder (John Marston), Bookes of Satyres (London, The Scourge ofFolly. Consisting of Satyricall 1598); John Davies, . . . (London, The Scourge of Baseness 1611); John Taylor, (London, 1624); Epigrams line 303: "A lash like mine no honest compare Alexander Pope, "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" shall dread." 37 of the constellations, in which Bootes the 36 W. itself a satiric topos.

M. Wilson, 1974), pp. 11-12. Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets (London, xxv. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, XXXIV ofFame lines 1239-50. Compare Universalis sive Ars Magna Consoni etDissoni (Rome, 1650). See Emanuel

man

Suggested perhaps by the iconography a stimulus. Herdsman wielded 38 39 Michael Drayton, King, Henry 35-6. "Upon

1619), song 14, lines 2-4. Poly-Olbion (London, the Death of My Ever Desired Friend Dr. Donne

of Paul's"

lines

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200 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

// Penseroso 73-5; L Allegro 93-4. H. James Jensen, The Muses' Concord: Literature, Music, Ind., 1976), pp. 171-91. Age (Bloomington, 42 See Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, 40 41 Shakespeare pastoral. 43 Eclogues 44 45 46 Ralph G?rard testing the limits of pastoral by

and

theVisual Arts in the Baroque

introducing

1974), p. 301, where she shows extreme instances of anti

Knevet,

is on the model of actual notebooks like Rilke 's The Notebook of Malte or 1959). "Notes" in a title may also indicate autobiographical Brigge (London, in Russian confessional writing; and, particularly literature, it has subversive associations. 48 For example, Charles Reznikoff, Family Chronicle (London, 1969). The Self Begetting Novel 49 See Steven G. Reliman, (New York, 1980); Patricia Waugh, 1984). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London, York, 1969), which Laurids

Evan S. Connell, Diary of a Rapist (London, For example, 1966); George Grossmith The Diary of a Nobody (London, and Weedon Grossmith, 1892). Beach at Carmel (New York, 1963) ;Brian 47 Evan S. Connell, Notes from a Bottle Found on the 1964); and Robert Lowell, Notebook 1967-8 (New Higgins, Notes while Travelling (London,

vii 12-13; Georgics iii 15; cf. Aeneid x 206. The Shorter Poems, ed. A. M. Charles (Columbus, 1966), "Aux Armes, Citoyens!," FMR, 39 (1989), 65-80. Sabatier,

pp.

307-8.

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