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Genres as Species and Spaces: Literary and Rhetorical Genre in The Anatomy of Melancholy
- Philosophy & Rhetoric
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 47, Number 2, 2014
- pp. 113-136
- Article
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Contemporary genre theory is dominated by metaphors of evolution and speciation; this article proposes alternate metaphors of spatiality and exchange. A spatial understanding of genre permits more productive interactions between literary and rhetorical genre theory. A reading of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy as a multigenred text suggests some of the potentials of this approach.