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This paper explores the contingent and affective dimensions of genre in Victorian criticism on the ballad. Aesthetic judgments comprise an important part of the historical meta-discourse surrounding literary genres, yet these categories occupy only a marginal position in our present theories of genre. The terms of aesthetic judgment tend to fall out when we tally historical genres' discursive conventions and map their formal and thematic contours. In contrast, Victorian literary criticism's dependence on the language of feeling, not only in describing individual works but also in shaping generic taxonomies, provides an opportunity to consider the ways in which the seemingly irreducible particularities of aesthetic experience meet the generalizing force of genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the Kelmscott editions of William Morris's late prose romances in reference to late-nineteenth-century typographical discourses. It identifies on the surface of the Kelmscott works a previously undisclosed record of print craftsmanship: a coordinated effort by Morris and his print workers to prevent textually encoded forms of distraction from accruing on the printed page. In so doing, it engages with past scholarship that has traced the politics of the Kelmscott book to its utopian methods of print production or to its idealized, textually implicit modes of aesthetic perception. Offering a new way of appreciating this politics, it considers the books' coordinated efforts to eliminate distractions as an organized resistance to the misguided technoprogressive logic informing modern print practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]