Genre and Genre Analysis

‘Genre’ is a term coined by literary critics to refer to different types of artistic production. Where classical writers distinguished among types of poetry, English literary critics of the 18th century wished to distinguish among types of novels, poetry, and drama. In post-Romantic esthetics, ‘genre pieces’ became stigmatized, and the term lost currency; however in the 20th century, linguists revived it to signify nonliterary communicative events with predictable elements. Different schools of genre analysis focus on the identification of predictable textual sequences, the discourse communities whose purposes are served by everyday genres, and how best generic conventions can be taught.