The Ideology of Genre

“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