"The Power of Genre" was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. "The Power of Genre" is a radical and systematic rethinking of the relationship between literary genre and critical explanation. Adene Rosmarin shows how traditional theories of genre - whether called "historical," "intrinsic," or "theoretical" - are necessarily undone by their attempts to define genre representationally. Rather, Rosmarin argues, the opening premise of critical argument is always critical purpose or, as E.H.Gombrich has said, function, and the genre or "form" follows the reform. The goal is a relational model that works. Rosemarin analyzes existing theories of genre - those of Hirsch, Crane, Frye, Todorov, Jauss, and Rader are given particular attention-before proposing her own. These analyses uncover the illogic...