Around 1830, literary criticism embraced the labels melodrama and melodramatic amid its crusade against Romantic writing. This cross-genre designation is a recurring phraseological feature, the uses and functions of which will be examined, focusing on the 1829 to 1857 period. Stripped of their generic meaning, these terms are part of the biased terminology adopted in the period’s criticism which, lacking specific novelistic poetics, drew on the imaginary of 19th century genres to play its descriptive, demarcational and normative role.