genre

Genre in French means type, kind, sort — from Latin genus (birth, origin, type, class). The Latin root is the same one that gives English 'gender,' 'generate,' 'genesis,' 'genus,' and 'gentle' (originally meaning 'well-born'). All of these words circle around the concept of origin and kind: what something is born as, what type it belongs to. Genre is the French form that English borrowed specifically for artistic classification.

Literary genre theory goes back to Aristotle's Poetics (~335 BCE), where he distinguished tragedy from comedy from epic. The French Neoclassical critics of the seventeenth century — Boileau, Corneille, Racine — rigidified genre distinctions into rules: a tragedy must have noble characters and end badly; a comedy must have common characters and end well. Mixing genres was forbidden. These rules governed French theater for over a century and influenced all of European literature.

English borrowed genre from French in the late eighteenth century, initially as a fine-art term. 'Genre painting' meant paintings of everyday scenes — as opposed to history painting, portraiture, or landscape. The word then expanded to cover literary classification (genre fiction), musical classification (genre of music), and eventually any categorical system. By the twenty-first century, genre was applied to video games, podcasts, TikTok trends, and restaurant types.

The word's expansion created a tension. In literary criticism, 'genre fiction' (mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy) is often contrasted with 'literary fiction' — implying that literary fiction has no genre, which is itself a genre claim. The word that means 'type' has become a judgment: genre fiction is typed, literary fiction is not. Aristotle would have found this distinction incoherent.