| "This
is a learned and lively book. It is a scholarly essay that makes for
absorbing as well as highly enjoyable reading; it functions as an
initiation to modern genre theory while making an important move within
that field; it deals with culture high and popular, and a range of
texts from the early modern era to the contemporary period; and its
writing runs a generic gambit of its own, now theoretical exposition,
now ingenious criticism, now theoretical fiction."—Ross Chambers,
University of Michigan
"Besides being impressed with Beebee's overall contribution to
genre theory, I am also extremely impressed with his individual
chapters, with his comparative methodology in practice, as he reads
texts and genres against each other. These readings expose generic
instability in very provocative ways. Each chapter, each pair of
works struck me as exquisitely performed. This is a work that will
appeal to theorists of genre but also to generalists, and especially
to those of us beginning to work in cultural studies, for Beebee
takes popular culture as seriously as elite, canonical culture."—J.
Douglas Canfield, University of Arizona
In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing
both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary
period, The Ideology of Genre counters both formalists and
advocates of the "death of genre," arguing instead for the inevitability
of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates
that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually,
by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre
is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny,
in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the
other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences,
and thus those places within and between texts where genres "collide"
reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy,
ideology, and the use-value of language. |
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