within the twentieth-century novel, the factory novel, school novel, war
novel, crime novel, and so on. For Fowler, then, genre and theme are in-
terrelated.^2
Fowler’s concept of genre as a communication system has been ex-tended in recent scholarship that analyzes the ideology implicit in var-
ious genres, along with its effect on writers and readers.^3 Some scholars
claim that genres as “literary institutions” (Fredric Jameson quoted in
Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction, 18 ) “encode [ideological discourses]”
(Cranny-Francis, 18 ), that is, inscribe power relationships, “fram[ing]
readers as well as texts”—indeed, that “genres are built on premises
about gender” (Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Questions,189–90) and
about class and race. One thinks, for example, of the eighteenth-century
neoclassical comedies such as Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhommeor
Mozart’s The Magic Flute,in which the lower-class “comic” lovers act as
foils for the upper-class “serious” lovers. Or of the “comic” African
American maid, who appeared in so many American film comedies of
the 1930 s and 1940 s, or of the inevitably terrorized or murdered young
white woman in slasher films.
But beyond communicating ideology, genres, according to literarycritic and author Joanna Russ, are actually structured by assumptions
about gender (“gender norms”), which can be seen more clearly when
they are reversed. She asks us to imagine, for example, a story about two
strong women battling for supremacy in the early West, or a young
woman finding her womanhood by killing a bear, or a stupid but se-
ductive heterosexual young man who represents “the essence of sex, the
‘soul’ of our corrupt culture, a dramatization of the split between the de-
grading necessities of the flesh and the transcendence of world-cleaving
Will” (“What Can a Heroine Do?” 7 ). Russ concludes that a writer who
does not accept the gender norms of a genre either will be reduced to
silence or forced to reinvent the genre. But, she continues, writers who
reinvent male-centered genres generally do not receive praise for their
originality; rather, critics find such work “formless” and “inexperi-
enced” in comparison to the “traditional” male-centered literary con-
ventions and myths that have been “distilled, dramatized, stylized, and
above all clarified” through centuries of use ( 11 ).^4
In this critical context I propose, first, to define the most importantRussian poetic genres of the 1820 s to 1850 s, along with their gender
norms; next, to consider the different ways men and women poets used
these genres; and finally, to examine the implications of such differences
58 Gender and Genre