Artists have concerned themselves with conventionalized pictorial genres since the early sixteenth century, when our conventional categories of landscape, still life, daily scenes (“genre” in the narrower sense), and even portraits developed their separate identities. In a training environment increasingly occupied by academies, genres were placed lower on the scale of value, within a hierarchy dominated by “history painting,” serious narratives from the Bible or myth. The task of theorizing genres, however, has largely been the prerogative of literary scholars, again beginning with the critics of the later sixteenth century and their separation of “kinds” as well as their rediscovery of Aristotle and the Latin division of modes of expression. Beyond literature, the most active analysis of pictorial modes has been picked up by historians and theorists of film, who have tackled the issues of conventionalized images, in terms of narrative formulas as well as favorite themes, characters, visual settings, and even relations, “syntax.” In film history, genres are most frequently associated with the market conditions of production and consumption of Hollywood cinema, which has given us genres such as the western, the musical, the horror film, and even “subgenres” such as “screwball comedy.” No author has spent more time...