Genre and its conventions

This extract is drama, and more precisely it belongs to the genre of tragedy: a character is alone on stage, speaking his private thoughts aloud at the threshold of a terrible act. The convention most clearly at work is the SOLILOQUY — the dramatic device by which a character, alone, leaks his inner life directly to the audience. Analysing how Shakespeare uses this convention shows the meaning the scene makes.

The first thing to recognise is that a soliloquy is a convention ONLY drama possesses. Because Macbeth is alone, there is no listener inside the play; the speech is addressed past the stage, to the watching audience. This is the convention's whole power: it grants the audience access to a mind that the other characters cannot see. The audience is made the sole witness to Macbeth's disturbance, and so becomes complicit in his secret.

What the soliloquy reveals is a mind already coming apart. The speech is built on a series of questions — 'Is this a dagger…?', 'Art thou not… sensible / To feeling as to sight?', 'or art thou but / A dagger of the mind…?' The interrogatives enact a man arguing with his own perception, unable to decide whether the vision is real or a 'false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain'. The soliloquy convention lets us watch this argument happen in real time, inside his head, which no dialogue with another character could deliver.

The dramatic situation sharpens the convention's effect. This is a tragedy, and the audience already expects a fall; the soliloquy shows the fall beginning not in action but in the mind. The hallucinated dagger 'toward my hand' literalises the temptation pulling Macbeth toward murder, and because we hear him try and fail to dismiss it as 'a dagger of the mind', we understand that the deed is already half-done in his imagination before it is done in fact.

What this extract finally achieves, through the convention of the soliloquy, is to make the audience the privileged witnesses of a conscience disintegrating. The genre of tragedy leads us to expect a downfall; the soliloquy shows us that downfall starting inside a single, questioning mind — and that intimacy, granted by a convention drama alone can use, is what makes the horror feel ours as well as his.

This poem belongs to the genre of the sonnet — a fourteen-line form whose conventions a reader recognises at once. The convention that most shapes its meaning is the VOLTA, the structural 'turn' a sonnet leads a reader to expect, usually around line 9 in the Petrarchan tradition. Analysing how Rossetti uses this convention reveals the poem's quiet reversal of itself.

The convention works only because it is known. A reader who recognises a sonnet brings an expectation: somewhere, often at line 9, the poem will TURN — its argument, mood or position will pivot. This expectation is part of the contract the form makes. Rossetti relies on it.

The octave establishes one position. It is built on the imperative 'Remember me', a plea repeated and surrounded by images of distance and absence — being 'gone far away into the silent land'. For eight lines the poem seems to be entirely about demanding to be remembered; the convention has us waiting for the turn that the form promises.

It arrives precisely at line 9, in a single conjunction: 'Yet'. 'Yet if you should forget me for a while / And afterwards remember, do not grieve.' Because the sonnet form has primed the reader for a volta at exactly this point, the word 'Yet' lands with structural weight far beyond its size. It is not a casual qualification but the hinge on which the whole poem swings — from a plea to be remembered toward permission to be forgotten. The convention has made a small word into the poem's turning point.

What this poem finally achieves, through the convention of the volta, is the conversion of an imperative into a release: love that demands becomes love that lets go. The meaning is delivered not by argument but by FORM — the turn the sonnet promised, arriving where the reader expected it, so that the change of heart feels structurally inevitable. Reading it, one feels the consolation arrive at the very moment the form said it would, which is why it lands.

This passage is prose, and specifically the opening of a novel — a sub-genre with its own convention: the opening must establish a voice and compel the reader onward. The conventions most at work here are the omniscient NARRATIVE VOICE and the anaphoric structure it deploys; analysing how the writer uses them shows how meaning is made before any plot has begun.

The governing convention is the third-person OMNISCIENT narrator. This is the prose convention that grants a narrator the authority to survey a whole age at once, standing above any single character. Here the narrator does not describe a scene or a person; he pronounces on an entire 'period', a vantage no first-person voice could command. The convention establishes, from the first clause, a narrator who knows everything and judges from above — and the reader, recognising the convention, grants him that authority.

The voice exercises that authority through anaphora — the repetition of 'it was' at the head of ten paired clauses. The omniscient narrator uses the convention of parallel structure to balance opposites: 'best of times / worst of times', 'wisdom / foolishness', 'belief / incredulity', 'Light / Darkness', 'Heaven / the other way'. The relentless parallelism creates an incantatory rhythm, and the paired opposites generate a paradoxical history that refuses to settle. The reader is not allowed to know what KIND of period this is — only that it is everything at once. The omniscient voice has used the genre's freedom to survey an age to deliver, deliberately, no single verdict.

Then the convention is turned. After the grand paired clauses, the narrator pivots with a dash and 'in short' — a comic understatement, since nothing about the preceding sentence has been short. The omniscient voice, having performed sweeping authority, now mocks the very rhetoric of authority: the age is recognisable because 'its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received… in the superlative degree of comparison only'. The narrator names the age's habit of self-importance and satirises it — and, crucially, satirises his OWN grand opening at the same time.

What this passage finally achieves, through the convention of the omniscient narrator, is a double effect: the reader is seduced by the music of the prose AND warned, by the narrator's final clause, that this is a voice that performs grandeur in order to expose it. The convention of omniscience usually offers reliable authority; Dickens exploits the convention to offer authority that mocks itself. That doubleness — pleasure in the rhetoric and ironic distance from it — is the contract the novel's opening makes with its reader.

This dramatic extract belongs to a recognisable sub-genre: the comedy of manners, a kind of comedy whose conventions satirise the speech and behaviour of a leisured social class. Identifying the genre is the key to the extract, because the meaning lives entirely in how its conventions — wit, paradox, and the gap between solemn form and trivial content — work together. The genre is the meaning.

The first convention is the comedy of manners' clipped, EPIGRAMMATIC dialogue. The exchanges are short and rapid, the speakers matching each other's pace as if in a verbal game with rules. This convention tells the audience at once what kind of world this is: one in which speech is a performance and being amusing matters more than being sincere. The dialogue's polished surface IS the social world the genre exists to expose.

The second convention is the deliberate GAP between rhetorical seriousness and trivial stakes. The comedy of manners conventionally applies maximum gravity to minimum substance, and here the apparatus of moral debate — the language of impropriety, principle and breach — is brought to bear on a plate of sandwiches. The mock-grave register is itself the joke: by treating a snack as a matter of principle, the genre reveals a class for whom the trivial IS principle, because their real principles are absent. The audience laughs at the elevated language and is invited, at the same moment, to see the emptiness it covers.

The third convention is PARADOX, the comedy of manners' signature device. Each character's lines twist a conventional truth into its inverse: the wrong reason offered for the right action, the rule defended by its breach. The man who eats the sandwiches he was told not to eat, and defends himself by accusing his accuser, is not merely being naughty — he is performing the structure of the play's entire social world, in which moral language is decorative and the only real rule is the rule of style. Paradox here is not ornament; it is dramatic exposure.

What this extract finally achieves, through the conventions of its genre, is the simultaneous indulgence and satire of its own social world. The genre offers the audience the pleasure of the wit AND the recognition of the emptiness the wit covers. Reading it, one wants to laugh and to flinch at once — which is the precise effect the comedy of manners works for, and the proof that, in this genre, the conventions do not decorate the meaning; they ARE it.

This poem is a sonnet — but its meaning depends almost entirely on the reader recognising the conventions of a particular SUB-genre, the love sonnet, and then watching the poem turn those conventions against themselves. The love sonnet is the context the reader brings; the subversion of its conventions is what the poem is for. Without the convention, the poem looks like a string of insults; with it, the same lines become an argument about honesty in love.

The convention the poem invokes is the Petrarchan idealisation of the beloved through flattering comparison — eyes like the sun, lips like coral, cheeks like roses, hair like golden wires. This convention is so established that a reader of a love sonnet EXPECTS it; it is the genre's default machinery, and the expectation is live from the first line.

Shakespeare exploits that expectation in order to subvert it. The poem opens 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun' and accumulates a run of NEGATIONS — 'Coral is far more red than her lips' red', snow whiter than her 'dun' breasts, 'black wires' where the convention demands golden ones. Read without the convention in mind, these are unkind observations. But the convention changes everything: against the expectation of idealising comparison, each negation reads not as insult but as a deliberate REFUSAL of cliche. The poem names the flattering simile the genre would supply, only to deny it — so it accumulates not insults but ABSENCES, every conventional compliment summoned in order to be withheld. The subversion is systematic: the convention is invoked precisely so that breaking it can mean something.

Because the convention has primed the reader for praise, the denials read as honesty rather than coldness. The speaker is dismantling, line by line, the false currency of poetic compliment, and the poem's argument is built out of the gap between what the love-sonnet convention promised and what the poem delivers. This is why the closing couplet can pivot so decisively: 'And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.' The word 'belied' names retrospectively what the whole poem has been doing — exposing the lie inside conventional praise — and 'false compare' makes the genre's own machinery the poem's target. The sonnet has used the love-sonnet conventions to attack the love-sonnet conventions.

What this poem finally achieves is an argument that real love needs no idealising comparison to be true — an argument made entirely through the subversion of a genre. Without the love-sonnet convention as the reader's expectation, the negations look like fault-finding; with it, they become integrity. The meaning does not sit alongside the genre; it is generated in the gap between the genre invoked and the use made of it. That is genre subversion working as the engine of meaning.

This passage belongs to the genre of prose fiction, and more precisely to the sub-genre of MODERNISM — and its whole meaning is generated by its relationship to the conventions of the novel-opening it inherits. My argument is this: the passage adopts the reassuring conventions of a tale told around a calm river only in order to subvert them, so that the meaning of the opening lives in the gap between the safe genre it invokes and the unsettling use it makes of that genre. The conventions are summoned to be turned.

The first convention the passage exploits is the FRAME narrative — the convention of a tale told by a narrator to a listener. Here the convention is doubled into a recursive frame: an outer narrator tells us about a listener listening to an inner narrator who is about to begin. The convention of the frame usually reassures, placing a calm teller between the reader and the events. This passage exploits that reassurance precisely to undermine it: by the time the inner narrator speaks, the reader is positioned two voices away from any event, and the prose never settles who is speaking when. The convention that normally grants narrative authority is used to make authority porous and untrustworthy. Modernism's distrust of a tidy story is built into the frame itself.

The second convention is the descriptive opening that establishes SETTING — and here the modernist sub-genre subverts what realism would do with it. A realist opening describes a setting to ground the reader; this opening uses long, sinuous, paratactic sentences that drift rather than ground. The hypnotic rhythm is itself a method: the reader is carried along, as the boat is carried on the river, and the meditative register makes it harder to notice when the meaning is shifting beneath the description. The convention of scene-setting is exploited to lull, not to anchor.

The third move is the SUBVERSION of the passage's own geography, and it is where the genre relationship pays off. The opening establishes a safe, familiar English scene — the Thames, the city, the calm light — only to pivot, through the inner narrator, to the claim that Britain 'has been one of the dark places of the earth'. The novel-opening convention leads the reader to assume that 'darkness' belongs elsewhere, in the unnamed land the inner tale will travel to; the sentence drags 'darkness' back to the imperial centre. The passage thus performs, in miniature, the reversal its conventions had set up the reader to resist: the safe centre and the dangerous periphery are revealed as mirrors, and the river the speakers sit on is continuous with the river they will travel up.

What the passage finally achieves, through its handling of genre, is the dismantling of the safe-centre / dangerous-periphery opposition before the story has even begun. Each convention it invokes — the reassuring frame, the grounding setting, the safe English scene — is exploited in order to be turned, so that the reader is made complicit in a narrative that will prove to be about the reader's own world. The genre relationship is the meaning: the opening works on its reader exactly as the novel will work on its themes, by using familiar conventions to make certainty impossible.