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Enzo Melandri

Literary Genres and Their Origins

Literary Genres and Their Origins

Translated by Alberto Toscano
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Forthcoming in December 2026

A bold rethinking of genre as both form and philosophical problem. 

Why do we have literary genres, and what problems do they solve? In this original engagement with the ancient problem of literary genres, Enzo Melandri begins by asking why literary genres exist in the first place. His investigation extends beyond literary history, as important as it is, to become a philosophical inquiry into the limits of language and the strategies language must employ to register the impossibility of fully grasping its relation to the world. In this light, tragedy, comedy, epic, elegy, and so on emerge as the musical and emotional traces language bears from its encounter with its own limits.

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