Generating Texts

Book excerpt: In Generating Texts, Sharon Cadman Seelig tests traditional notions of genre by analyzing parallels between works that confound existing categories. Seelig pairs three seventeenth-century prose works with three other works, each of a later century: Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy with Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Browne's Religio Medici with Thoreau's Walden, and Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions with Eliot's Four Quartets. Proceeding from her authors' similarities in method and common sets of assumptions (such as concern with process and discovery, time and eternity, or the nature of the self), she uncovers parallels showing that genre is not simply a set of formal features but rather a particular way of seeing the world that grows out of authorial attitude, impulse, and occasion. In addition to its obvious appeal to students and scholars interested in Sterne, Thoreau, Eliot or seventeenth-century literature, Generating Texts should interest literary scholars and students more generally, particularly those concerned with the interconnections between literary periods and genres. Seelig has written an original and accessible contribution to the field of genre study.