Beginning with George Eliot's idea for a new kind of realism, and taking as a given that there is no pure "genre," we will discuss the nature and interaction of those constructions understood as genres both within and between Victorian novels (such as realism; sensation fiction; Gothic and melodrama), and some non-novelistic ones, such as non-fiction prose and (again) melodrama; we will also look at the role of the critical establishment in producing and policing such distinctions, and the role of theory and criticism more generally in discussions of genre.