Resource for a history of the notion of genre

Abstract

Unlike the primitive naturalistic or mythological and literary explanations of the world, the notion of genre, implying universal categories of beings, had two basic functions, in the historical and cultural context in which it arose: to provide man with another criterion of thinking and understanding the world as a rationally organized universe, and to make possible an intervention in this very universe insuflar as, using the classes of the genres and the subclasses of the species, this notion could atribute an organization and a hierarchy in accordance with their own perspectives, values and interests to natural phenomena and human problems.