“Genres and Poetology: The Novel and the Way towards Aesthetic Self-Consciousness”, in Handbook of the English Novel, 1830-1900, edited by Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 87-106

This chapter opens by mentioning Virginia Woolf’s opinions on the nature of the novel as a “cannibalistic” creature, which is capable of incorporating influences not only from the literary world but also from other forms of art. In investigating the various literary genres that characterised the Victorian novel (from the Bildungsroman to the sensation novel, from the realistic novel to the so-called ‘scientific romances’) we will also refer to nineteenth-century art movements such as Impressionism and Aestheticism, so as to reflect on the importance of the dialogue between literature and art. The basic idea is that literary genres are not static constructions but dynamic sys- tems in which changes and mutations occur alongside definite rules that make a genre recognisable. In studying single generic typologies, it could be thus possible to reconstruct a specific historical milieu according to a diachronic perspective.