The ideology of genre Book

What is 'genre'? If you answers "fiction" or "nonfiction" or "scifi" or "romance," then you need to read this book, because it will have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about genre.

This is an excellent work for anyone reading literature. It lays out genre as a process and not a static system of categorization and "typing" of species, which by the time this book was published was already common knowledge among people who nerdily obsess about this kind of thing, and not common knowledge at all for the public. Genre for Beebee is a question of power, of ideology, which is why we have things like the "canon" still controlling the curriculum.

What Beebee does so well is riddle the history and theory of genre with funny details, such as his description of romance novel covers: "Need I describe [them]? A half-naked man and a half-naked woman in some sort of embrace, with a castle or cypress tree or clipper ship or mountain range in the background, perhaps a sword covering the pudenda..." (3) I don't often laugh out loud reading academic books, but little snippets like these had me rolling even when it became dense. Chapter 7 has this lovely meta-snippet: "Not clear is the purpose of this writing which I am not giving to the world... There remains the bizarre possibility that a young researcher desperate for publishable material planted a hearing device on one of these two and transcribed their ravings... It is even more probable to assume that the author was simply fudging her data, desperately hoping that her inferior creative effort would appear before the eyes of her tenure committee in the raiments of the loftier genre of research." (Ouch!)

I also appreciate the way Beebee lays out heavy thinkers (Derrida, Althusser) in a way that is not only completely accessible but sets aside some of the silly academic infighting for the real stakes. He was perhaps overly harsh on Marie-Louise Pratt, but I'm sure that could be a result of the academic genre of hating on someone at least once in your scholarship to prove your intellectual superiority, like two lions gnawing off the other's paw.

That aside, this was overall a truly insightful and necessary book.