3 .Gender and Genre
The previous two chapters outlined the social conditions that the poets
we have been considering faced as women, as well as their varying re-
sponses to male-defined literary conventions. In this chapter I would
like to consider their distinctive use of genre and themes, which, as we
shall see, are interrelated.
Recently some scholars have dismissed genre as arbitrary, if notmeaningless: “Genre is any group of works selected on the basis of some
shared feature” (Reichert, “More Than Kin,” 57 ). Most, however, still
consider it an essential literary concept: “There can be no meaning with-
out genre” (E. O. Hirsch quoted in Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Ques-
tions, 16 ); “genres underlie, motivate and organize all literary discourse”
(Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 5 ). Because literary genre
is such an ambiguous and multifaceted concept—with a history ex-
tending back at least to Aristotle’s Poetics—in any such discussion it is
essential to define one’s terms and approach.^1
For our purposes I find most useful Alastair Fowler’s functional de-scription of genre as “a communication system for the use of writers
in writing and readers and critics in reading and interpreting” (Kinds of
Literature, 256 ). So, for example, if we know we are watching farce, we
might laugh at something that we would not laugh at in a tragedy.
Fowler sensibly points out that genres change, combine, and divide over
time. The epic, for example, encompasses works as diverse as the Iliad
and Paradise Lost.Rather, Fowler prefers to discuss “kinds” of litera-
ture—genres of a specific period, such as the romance, picaresque novel,
revenge play, ode, or dystopia—further subdividing “kinds” into “sub-
genres” on the basis of their subject matter or motif. For example, within
the eighteenth-century ode there are birthday odes and marriage odes;
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