Learning to read the past in the early historical novel

Genres are, at their cores, ways of reading. Generic labels create sets of expectations for readers, offering a sense of how to navigate through a new work based on their experiences with other works from the same genre. If a reader picks up a book they know to be a comic novel, for example, they will be alert to moments of irony, incongruity and absurdity, judging those moments to be intentional effects of the author, whereas if the same text came with the generic label of ‘a sentimental tragedy’, the reader would judge those moments of absurdity as failures on the part of the author and aesthetic flaws. In the early stages of establishing a new genre (or significantly modifying an older one), readers must be guided on how to recognise and respond to that genre in order to establish a recognisable pattern and way of reading.