Spotting Rossetti in the Newspaper: A Proposal for "Neuro-Genre"

Abstract: This essay investigates what it means for the genre of lyric poetry when readers can spot a lyric poem, without even reading it, in a nineteenth-century newspaper. Bringing in current neuroscience to explain the immediacy of this recognition, I propose we add "neuro-genre" to the variety of ways that genre has been reformulated away from a taxonomic system to be a classification based on socially, historically, and materially contextualized use. This addition is justified through an exploration of newspaper reprints of Christina Rossetti's "Song [When I am Dead]," using a digital humanities-based examination of the spatial signifiers of the formatting and text. Neuro-genre suggests an underlying cognitive basis for a more flexible form of genre, and highlights that such a genre theory creates a need for and a pleasure in texts that push back at readerly expectations.