The kind, sort, or style of an art-object (see ART). To classify by genre is to exercise an ancient reflex. In the Republic, Plato divided poetry into the mimetic and the non-mimetic; in the Poetics, Aristotle further divided mimesis into tragedy and comedy. Subsequent writers spoke of dithyrambs, satires, and elegies. Indeed, a kind of atavism inheres in a word that hails from gens, meaning “kind,” “family,” or “race.” Genre sorts artifacts according to their commonalities. When one sees a genre, one imagines lines of filiation and descent, reversion to an ancestral type or variation from it. Northrop Frye believed that the West had unlearned to taxonomize because humanists after the eighteenth century reacted against that impulse so central to Linnaeus and his heirs (e.g., Humboldt, Darwin, Mayr). As naturalists dealt perhaps the decisive blow to human beings’ sense of cosmic isolation and superiority, Romantics and, later, Modernists insisted upon it: they taught that artists should express individual will, or, in default of that, that they should at least “make it new.” There’s a hint of the resulting distaste for genre in the dismissive adjective, “generic.” Dime novels, country songs, and sitcoms are generic; the avant-garde is not. Some scholars have observed a characteristic reluctance among artists to admit that art is by and large the production and reproduction of very similar stuff, and these scholars have engaged theories of social, cultural, and psychological structure in order to account for the family resemblance. But one may not need a theory of what genre is in order to understand what genre does. After all, genre is that rare construct which one encounters in the classroom or scholarly journal and actually applies in the workshop or studio. Apart from an eccentric handful of artists who vociferate upon their absolute departure from precedent (and isn’t dissimilarity a form of similarity?), creative individuals tend explicitly to take from those they admire, and tend explicitly to hope to be taken from in turn. Even the strongest poets form coteries and imitate their friends. They write reviews and curate exhibits of work they enjoy. Critics tend to flatter themselves by assigning relative value to this or that object, but they might do well to expiate that neurosis elsewhere. For longer than the historical record can show, artifacts have been made from other artifacts precisely that they may resemble them. Families infuriate and sicken; but they also welcome, shelter, and console.