Genre: The Idea and Work of Literary Form

The English Renaissance is an Age of Genre, an Era of Literary Form. The evidence exists both in practice and in theory. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, authors writing in poetry, drama, and fiction join literary critics producing treatises in making this period pioneering. Indeed, a symbiosis between intelligent formal theory and revolutionary inventive practice becomes a defining feature of the English Renaissance. Taxonomy, rather than the antithesis of invention, becomes the driving engine of great English Renaissance authorship: a basic idea of genre helps authors use literary form to perform work on behalf of readers.