The hero of the essay is Professor Ireneusz Opacki (1933–2005), a distinguished Polish philologist from the Silesian University, an author of a famous treatise Krzyżowanie się postaci gatunkowych jako wyznacznik ewolucji poezji (1961). The text (entitled Royal Genres) included in the anthology Modern Genre Theory (Ed. D. Duff, Longman 2000) establishes (along with texts by Croce, Tynianov, Propp, Bakhtin, Frye, Jauss, Genette and Derrida) the canon of literary genre theory. Opacki combines the history of literature with the theory of evolution in a much more modern way than the positivist followers of Darwin. He analyses relation between “royal genres”, which combine with others to establish “blood relations”. Traces of that process in individual poems reveal the course of evolution of poetry.
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