Genre Studies

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Whether it is crime fiction or sci-fi, romance or comedy, genre shapes our expectations as readers of the stories we encounter. Yet genre can be a surprisingly slippery concept to define, and texts are often as satisfying when they subvert our expectations as when they fulfil them. Students on this module will consider a range of transformative genres that emerged first in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: from the epistolary novel (told through letters), satire and the slave narrative, to ballads and illuminated poetry. As we shall see, these texts helped to define genres we are still familiar with today, yet they, nonetheless, manage to defy our expectations all these centuries later.