Genre-generating Factors and Historical Changes

A literary text can take various generic forms depending on a number of factors, including social and cultural circumstances, ideological constraints, technical aspects of the actual situation, features of the audience – these are called genre-generating factors.

The actual occasion obviously determines which genre the author is going to choose. A novel will not be suitable to address a congregation of people; a poem is hardly sufficient to tell the history of a civil war; a drama is too long to recite when an ambassador has to be greeted in a ceremony. The cultural register of the audience also has an effect on the choice of the writer: a select group of aristocrats will have expectations that are very different from the attitude of the townsfolk in front of a scaffold when somebody is to be executed: an ode might be a good choice in the first case, a satirical mock hymn in the latter.

Perhaps the most important general genre-generating factor is the social and educational status of the public, and this factor accounts for the historical fact that different genres are dominant in different historical period. We are going to demonstrate this on the example of Shakespeare and English Renaissance drama.

Undoubtedly, the most popular and dominant genre of the English Renaissance was the drama. The Elizabethan period is also called the Golden Age of English dramatic literature, and William Shakespeare (1564 – 1626) was the most significant figure of this period. He wrote important pieces of poetry, a very significant collection of sonnets, but he was most successful with, and became highly praised ever since for his dramas.

It is important to see that a great number of conditions must be present for a particular kind or genre of literature to become dominant in a given historical context, and sometimes the absence of certain conditions might also work as a genre-generating factor. In the Elizabethan period in the second half of the 16^th century, somebody writing novels or narratives could hardly become successful or even make a living, since books depend on many cultural elements: you need a reading public, for a reading public you need a literate and educated population, for an educated population you need a welfare state and an advanced social system. But it is not enough to have a literate public, because books also need to be edited, printed and distributed, so you need a literary institution with people earning money from the book trade. Books also have to be purchased by the reading public, so you need a relatively well-to-do population which can afford buying books, and the books have to be about topics that the public is interested in and which can be renewed again and again.

These conditions were not present in Shakespeare’s time. The population was mostly illiterate, the literary institution was just about to take shape, and people had no money to spend on books that were very expensive at the time. Thus, this was not the time for the novel to flourish – it was the golden age of drama. The reason for the dominance of drama as a genre is very simple: plays did not have to be purchased and read, because they were staged in live performances in the very popular Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres. Shakespeare himself was not only a very successful playwright, but also a theatrical businessman who owned shares in the enterprise of the Globe Theatre, where most of his plays were performed.

By the 18^th century, however, the above mentioned genre-generating factors were already present in English society, and the novel became the dominant genre of a new emerging social class, the middle class, or the English bourgeoisie. This new social class was already literate, it purchased books and magazines regularly, and it was interested in current social and political issues and manners that were the main topic of the new genre, the English novel.

As we move on in the history of British literature, we will observe that genres and decorum behave differently, depending on the dominant cultural taste of the period. After the religiously determined and limited perspectives of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance brought about experimentation and looser genre categories. After the Renaissance and the Commonwealth of Cromwell, the period of the Restoration gave rise to an abundance of emotions, heroic grandeur and spectacle in the arts in general, giving birth to the genre of the opera. This was followed by the restrained atmosphere of Classicism of the 18^th century, when the Augustan Period again observed the strict principles of classical decorum. By the beginning of the 19^th century, the new trend of Romanticism started to protest against restraints of Classicism and the negative effects of technological advancement, metropolitan urbanism and capitalist competition. Romantic writers praised the power of human imagination, and found refuge and inspiration in the ancient heroic past, in the uncivilized energies of nature, or the mysticism of the exotic East. They also ignited a trend in which genre categories started to become less and less important, a process that has been going on ever since. The Victorian period might be marked by the dominance of the novel, but with high modernism in the 20^th century and especially with postmodernism after the 1960s and 70s, genre categories started to be systematically blurred by the experimentations of various literary styles and trends.