Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 243-340. “Fourth Essay. Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres.” New York: Atheneum, 1967 (orig. 1957).

For all the loving care that is rightfully expended on the printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays, they are still radically acting scripts, and belong to the genre of drama. If a Romantic poet gives his poem a dramatic form, he may not expect or even want any stage representation; he may think entirely in terms of print and readers; he may even believe, like many Romantics, that the stage drama is an impure form because of the limitations it puts on individual expression. Yet the poem is still being referred back to some kind of theatre, however much of a castle in the air. A novel is written, but when Conrad employs a narrator help him tell his story, the genre of the written word is being assimilated into that of the spoken one…It might be thought simpler, instead of using the term radical, to say that the generic distinctions are among the ways in which literary works are ideally presented, whatever the actualities are. But Milton, for example, seems to have no idea of reciter and audience in mind for Paradise Lost; he seems content to leave it, in practice, a poem to be read in a book. When he uses the convention of invocation, thus bringing the poem into the genre of the spoken word, the significance of the convention is to indicate what tradition his work primarily belongs to and what its closes affinities are with. 247