Content area
Full Text
Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982.
"This book," writes Fowler in his Preface, "springs from the conviction that it is time to enlarge the critical repertory: to recover a sense of the variety of literary forms. . .1 have tried to follow out some of the implications of treating genres not as literary classes but as families subject to change" (p. v). Renaissance scholars will recognize in this last statement the thought of Rosalie Colie: and, indeed, had Fowler's work not been dedicated to E. D. Hirsch it might have been explicitly, as it is implicitly, a tribute to her memory. While it ranges with grace and erudition from Homer to Philippe Sollers, its Renaissance aspect in a sense provides the expansion, the apparatus, Colie might have added to The Resources of Kind. The harmony of Fowler's thought with hers goes well beyond the numerous citations: a forest sprung from The Resources' sapling, it illustrates delightfully the often-abused concept of the seminal work.
Yet it should not be assumed that the actual dedication is either an error or a private quirk. For Fowler is acutely conscious that, as far as the "historical kinds" are concerned, he is writing in what seems a setting part of time, when genres (it is believed) "must be arrived at de novo rather than ab ovo, "and when critics confuse generic terms out of ignorance or conviction. Underlying Kinds of Literature's intelligent and good-humoured readiness to engage in state-of-the-art discussion,1 there is nevertheless an abiding sense of a citadel to be defended, a patrimony to be restored. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that when in the final chapter the author explicitly arrives at Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation, that work's defence of meaning is emphatically, even vehemently, endorsed.2
The task which Fowler has tackled is gigantic, and his success is correspondingly impressive. For not only does he allow the reader to survey the luxuriant jungle of two millenia's attempts to categorize the literary episteme; he also draws together the many specialized modern studies of specific genres, establishes a reasonably ordered, commonsense terminology that will be hard to...