Yes, and that's what Shakespeare's making fun of with "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastorical-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited."
We call all those things genres; the point I was trying to make wasn't that the Elizabethans and Jacobeans didn't categorize their writing; it's that "genre" isn't a fixed term. As all words do for Humpty Dumpty, it means what you use it to mean.
Genres go out of style because either they no longer serve any cultural purpose, or they've been supplanted by a genre that serves the same purposes they do, plus something else. So, for example, romance is defunct because it couldn't compete with the novel. Epic poetry is largely defunct--well, because again we use the novel for that purpose, and because poetry doesn't mean the same thing to us that it did to the Romans or the Greeks or the Anglo-Saxons.
Art of all kinds gets made because people need it (for a loose and wide-ranging definition of "need"). What art gets made in a particular culture at a particular time depends on what those particular people happen to need. (For a good specific working out of this idea, Stephen King talks about the monster movies of the 50s in Danse Macabre.) So if a genre isn't doing what people need (either for artist or audience), it doesn't survive.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2005-06-25 05:25 pm (UTC)We call all those things genres; the point I was trying to make wasn't that the Elizabethans and Jacobeans didn't categorize their writing; it's that "genre" isn't a fixed term. As all words do for Humpty Dumpty, it means what you use it to mean.
Genres go out of style because either they no longer serve any cultural purpose, or they've been supplanted by a genre that serves the same purposes they do, plus something else. So, for example, romance is defunct because it couldn't compete with the novel. Epic poetry is largely defunct--well, because again we use the novel for that purpose, and because poetry doesn't mean the same thing to us that it did to the Romans or the Greeks or the Anglo-Saxons.
Art of all kinds gets made because people need it (for a loose and wide-ranging definition of "need"). What art gets made in a particular culture at a particular time depends on what those particular people happen to need. (For a good specific working out of this idea, Stephen King talks about the monster movies of the 50s in Danse Macabre.) So if a genre isn't doing what people need (either for artist or audience), it doesn't survive.