genre

"Roman satirists may be thought of as functioning within a triangle of which the apices are (a) attack, (b) entertainment, and (c) preaching. If a poem rests too long on apex (a) it passes into lampoon or invective; if it lingers on (b) it changes into some form of comedy; and if it remains on (c) it becomes a sermon." Niall Rudd, Themes in Roman Satire

What is striking and original about Rudd's application of this theoretical structure for satire is the fact that he sees a good deal of movement within individual pieces; the effect is on of hovering and flitting, like a bird that never alights. (Which is why my bird traps on the ground keep turning up with nothing more than handfuls of feathers, I suppose - time to construct a bow and arrow.)

            One of my basic, but as yet unexplored and unsupported, assumptions about genre is that ‘genre’ refers to structure, and that ‘genre’ does not give a very reliable indication of content or of function. Thus, I identify Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” as a letter on the basis of the structural elements at the beginning and end: the piece opens with “H.M. Prison, Reading” and “Dear Bosie”, and ends with “your affectionate friend, Oscar Wilde”, as well as putting the piece into the context of a history and a potential future of correspondence. However, on page 97 right near the beginning, Wilde refers to what he is doing as “writing your [Bosie’s] life and

In the first chapter ('History') of Neil Bartlett's Who Was That Man? (a bio of Oscar Wilde), Bartlett describes three forms of gay narrative, three genres:

1) The personal coming out story.

2) The history of homosexuality.

3) And one which "combines the historical methods of the second with the individual subject of the first. The hero in this case is a single, usually 'great' homosexual. His fame rests in part on being hidden, on being in need of revelation ..."

And another thing:

Genre is not the same as structure. Genres usually have a structure, though there is a certain amount of malleability in the structure for the particular works in a given genre: less for a sonnet than a novel, more for a comedy than a tragedy (and at one point does something stop being a novel and become something else which is novel-like? Difficult.) What distinguishes structure from genre? Do particular genres have a particular kind of content? No. What is there to a piece of writing besides structure and content?