1. Literary Genres

1. Literary Genres

To approach The Lord of the Rings, considering its textual nature and before any consideration about its literary genre made from its contents, a proper starting point should be a brief review about the history of English narrative, and mostly about novel. As Tolkien’s masterpiece, novel itself has been, during the development of literary theory, a controversial genre regarding its definition and classification. One of the first approaches to the history of novel as a genre was provided by Russian Formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin, in his essay From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse (included in David Lodge's Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader, 2000:104-36), who pointed that from the 17th to the 19th century, theoreticians of the novel focused in style, and so it remained until the 1920’s. These early studies were mainly concentrated in individual styles of writing; everything was reduced to the individual features of each author. Unfortunately, they stood afar from the aim to identify a genre, so the analysis of (individual) style proved to be insufficient to define a categorization yet (Lodge, 105-6). But on the other hand, one of the most interesting points concerning the genre of novel comes also from Formalism, and it was displayed by theoretic Boris Eikhenbaum, as quoted and explained by Robert Scholes in his essay The Contributions of Formalism and Structuralism to the Theory of Fiction:

In the main, however, the European novel of the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries was dominated by description, psychological portraiture, and scenic presentation. "In this manner," says Eichenbaum, "the novel broke with narrative form and became a combination of dialogues, scenes, and detailed presentations of decor, gestures, and intonations." For Eichenbaum, then, the novel is a "synchretic" form, which is made up of other "elementary" forms.

Scholes, 144

Thus, concerning these so-called “elementary” forms (features from other genres), Tolkien's work contains noticeable features from fantasy novel, adventure novel and science fiction. To prove the presence of these narrative genres, the three following sub-sections are a brief review of definitions and some examples from each genre and their presence and connection with The Lord of the Rings. In the first section of the corpus of this research project all the specific resembling features from other genres (those which have already been identified as well as some possible others) will be analysed in depth.