In this essay I argue that generic analysis offers more satisf means of relating literary to social formations than methods seeking to discover contradictions in ideology. Since literary structures may or may not be hegemonic, and differences within texts and groups of texts may or may not amount to contradictions, it seems desirable to consider alternatives to ideology as means of ordering literary works. Eighteenth-century authors used generic differences to promote or accommodate social differences; by treating eighteenth-century genres as differential structures and mixed kinds, we may have less occasion to interpret complexity as contradiction.

In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note that" The ranking of literary genres or authors in a hierarchy [is] analogous to social classes"(p. 2), but also point out a" recurrent pattern":" the'top'attempts to reject and eliminate the'bottom'for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other... but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life"(the authors' emphasis). Mixed kinds undermine norms of cultural uniformity. But if genres can accommodate mixture, the