الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 156 |  |  |
| | | from | 156 | | |
Abstract
Living in such a world of changes and contradictions must affect literature and its genres. Theory of literary genres is a dynamic theory in criticism. It has witnessed many changes through ages. This study wants to construct a general idea about the concept of genre through modernism and postmodernism. This concept is applied to some poems by E. E. Cummings and A’laa’ Abdel-Hady.
The concept of genre is a problematic one. It is not just a means of classifying literature as some critics conceive it, but the concept of genre has received many different dimensions through ages. The elements of time and audience are new elements that have been added to the concept of genre in modernism and postmodernism.
The phenomenon of genre-mixing is the characteristic feature of the modernist genre theory. Borders among literary genres have been crossed. The resulted in-between genre has features from different genres. Interdisciplinarity of genres is the peculiar feature of postmodernism. Literary genres exceed their borders to interact with different arts like plastic arts. Prose poem is the salient literary genre that can be mixed with other literary genres in modernism and different plastic arts in postmodernism. The findings are tested by applying them to the poetry of Cummings as a representative of the Anglo-American literature and the poetry of Abdel-Hady as a representative of the Arabic literature.