Genres as Species and Spaces: Literary and Rhetorical Genre in The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.