Robert Lee, Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics

One can argue that literary criticism is primarily concerned with categorization. In their first year of study, students on an English Literature BA are asked to think about genre – about the difference between poetry and prose – and about subgenres, ranging from epic poetry to the detective novel. Such taxonomies are very helpful because they enable us to assess individual bodies of work as well as to place texts within the context of an ongoing literary story. What makes literature indis...