Is the Twentieth-Century Novel a Genre?

Genres are the Sirens of literary criticism. They seem friendly and alluring, but they are dangerously elusive shape-shifters. You really have to lash yourself to the mast.

Genres tend to be pictured as the bones of literary texts, the formal properties onto which the imagery and details of character, plot, and setting are grafted.

It is hard to extract a robust definition of 'tragedy' that works for all three. Similarly, we call the Odyssey an epic. But why isn't it a novel?

We are operating with a ridiculously small sample size. Franco Moretti pointed out that when literature professors talk about 'the nineteenth-century British novel,' they are talking about roughly two hundred books.

Read at The New Yorker