Distinct Genre Research Articles

Affective Profit

Affective Profit

The Witch in Flight

The Witch in Flight

An Unexpected Literary Depiction of Late Imperial Clerical Life: the Promotion of Catholicism in Nepokladnye Liudi: Povest-Biografiia iz Zhizni Pravoslavnago Dukhovenstva (Inflexible People: an Account-Biography from the Life of the Orthodox Clergy) by A. N. Zviezdin (Priest Aleksei Zerchaninov)

One of the more curious texts produced in the Russian Orthodox clerical milieu is the 1904 novel Nepokladnye liudi. At first glance, it seems to belong to the “insider” clerical exposé started by the works of Priest Ioann Beliustin. While Nepokladnye is written by an Orthodox cleric and set in the Russian Orthodox clerical milieu, however, its over-riding goal is to promote Roman Catholicism. Nepokladnye thus combines two fundamentally distinct genres: the “insider”, semi-autobiographical Russian Orthodox clerical novel, and the polemical apologia for Roman Catholicism. Its criticism of the Russian clerical milieu is not limited to the usual accounts of venality, poverty, and alcoholism, but also attacks Orthodox liturgy, Orthodox theology, and sexual abuse by Orthodox clergy. While more of tendentious tract than a literary landmark, the semi-autobiographical novella is an informative and neglected curiosity that deserves to be better known.

Fake News: Is it Made for Men or Women?

Fake news has become an integral part of modern life. It represents a distinct genre within news discourse, characterized by manipulation and the dissemination of deceptive information through mass media. Fake news is primarily defined by elements of 'falsehood,' 'deceit,' and 'manipulation,' which underlie its close connection with both misinformation and disinformation. Those who create fake news often tailor their content to exploit the potential interests and vulnerabilities of their target audience, including gender-related themes and stereotypes to generate heightened engagement. This study aims to explore students' perceptions of gender-related aspects in fake news, such as the gender of fake news creators, readers, and the specific gender-related topics covered within fake news. The study involved a structured questionnaire designed to elicit responses that provide valuable insights into how fake news is perceived in connection with gender issues. The results of the experiment highlight the participants' overall understanding of the relationship between fake news and gender. Young people generally believe that the creation of fake news is not inherently dependent on one's gender. However, some students do recognize a tendency in fake news production where female authors are seen as more involved in creating content for women, while male authors tend to target a male audience. These preferences appear to align with certain gender-related stereotypes associated with specific fake news topics. This suggests that despite the general perception of fake news as gender-neutral, stereotypical views can still influence how fake news is understood in relation to gender.

The Genre of Female Metaphysical Detective Novel: Tradition and Modernity

This article investigates female metaphysical detective novel as a specific literary genre of crime fiction. The theoretical framework of the study includes several cross-fertilizing approaches such as the structuralist approach to the genre theory, the theory of postmodern anti-detective novel, and the feminist reading of the detective novel evolution. The nexus where these mutually correlated theoretical approaches overlap is the concept of female metaphysical detective novel.This subgenre of detective fiction intertwines several important elements of the postmodern aesthetics, i.e., self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and subver-siveness with emphasis on political, gender, and class issues. The specific character of female-authored de-tective stories is studied diachronically and synchronically. The evolution of the genre of female metaphysi-cal detective novel from the Golden Age until now is considered through the lens of metaphysical or hetero-topian settings that are featured in detective fiction writtenby women. First, it is shown that the construction of space in several Golden Age narratives provides grounds to consider them the precursors of contemporary female metaphysical novel. The conclusion is made that even before feminism was universally recognized as a literary theory, women had been trying to break out of the ‘locked room’ canon designated for them mainly by traditional literary criticism. Next, several new tendencies are pinpointed that have appeared in female-authored detective fiction onlyrecently. Finally, the set of generic features is identified that are characteristic of female metaphysical detective novel as a distinct genre of crime fiction. Most prominently, the novels epitomizing the genre foreground the evolution of the heroine’s identity depicted as a complex network of gendered spaces.

The Cutting Edge between Nationalistic Commitment (Iltizam) and Literary Compulsion (Ilzam) in Palestinian Literature

This paper presents war literature as a distinctive genre intertwined with various schools of social thought and literary criticism including nationalism, social realism, and commitment. It puts forward a definition of war literature and the history of its emergence. It also attempts to explore some gray areas in war literature, relating to its artistic and creative modes of writing, its biases and prejudices. It questions the principles of authenticity and representation in this literary genre, addressing the contestation between reality and fiction, aesthetics and ideology, which dominate the discourse of postcolonial studies. The paper chooses Palestinian literature as a model case study, discussing the effects of the Sartrean school of commitment, Arabized in the concept of Adab al-Iltizam, on the creativity and individuality of writers. It discusses some of the general characteristics and themes of Palestinian literature, moving from early war literature (1948) to more contemporary works (1990s-), and presents how some writers manage to walk the thin line between literary representation and national commitment and succeed, without falling into the quagmire of propaganda or mundanity, to depict a national cause still subjected to colonialism in a postcolonial era.

The Language Question in the Indian English Novel

The discourse of nation, nationalism and its derivatives has become inseparable from literature and language. In order to define and give expression to one’s self, one needs a language, a medium. Since the colonial process itself begins in language, language being the colonizer’s gift to the colonised, it remains a fundamental site of debate and struggle for the nationalistic writers. In India, English as a medium of expression of the self has found its place in novels, poetry, songs etc. Initially, the use of English by the Indians remained confined to writing or drafting pamphlets, speeches and articles on the burning issues and problems of the time. It is called the imitative stage. Very soon the natives became deft in using the language as an expression of their literary sensibilities too. Professor Iyengar’s large and detailed book on Indian Writing in English, published in 1962, was a pioneering effort which succeeded in establishing Indian writing in English as a distinct genre. In the African context, Ngugi wa Thiong’o says that “Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.” In fact, post-colonial writers who write in English have used it as a “cultural vehicle” through which they introduce “world audience” to culturally diverse societies.

Bundles to beat the band in high-stakes tests: Pedagogical applications of an exploratory investigation of lexical bundles across band scores of the IELTS writing component

Lexical bundles (LBs) in ESL/EFL examinees' writings and the effectiveness of their instruction on the learners’ performance are under-researched as far as international high-stakes examinations, particularly IELTS (International English Language Testing System) writing genre(s), are concerned. To fill these gaps, the present two-phased study, in its exploratory phase, aimed at investigating the form, functions, and distribution of LBs in approximately 1000 mock academic IELTS writing tasks across three levels of writing competence. For the next phase, a pedagogical intervention was implemented and its impact on improving the performance of the IELTS candidates was evaluated. The results demonstrated that the higher the proficiency of the examinees, the higher the frequency and range and the more varied the structures and functions of deployed LBs. Additionally, the majority of the LBs were equally dispersed in all parts of the texts although there were some instances which characterized introduction, body, or conclusion sub-sections. Finally, the adopted explicit functional pedagogical approach was found to be effective, especially in boosting cohesion and coherence and lexical resources scores. Highlighting the nature of IELTS texts as distinct genres, we conclude with the implications of studying (and teaching) LBs for writing instruction and examination.

Sisters, Bosom Chums, and Enemies

This article explores the functions of secondary girl characters in English-language American and Canadian girls’ Bildungsromane. Previously, we have explored girls’ literature as a distinct genre, framed in the theory of genre as social action, and our past scholarship examines the ways in which pre-WWII girls’ Bildungsroman stories emphasize girls’ eventual integration into their communities. Rather than having adventures, as in boys’ coming-of-age texts, we have noted ways in which the main girl characters grow “down” into social restrictions, usually as (potential) wives and mothers. Secondary female characters in these girls’ stories are compared, contrasted, or conflated with their close peers as they grow to womanhood, whether they function as the protagonists' “bosom friend,” a rival or “frenemy,” a sibling, or a classmate. However, without the same coming-of-age expectations of a text’s or series’ heroine, these secondary female characters often demonstrate alternate paths to womanhood, highlighting diversities or serving as a warning to the girl protagonists on their journeys.

Generic Structure Analysis of Anthems of Selected Universities in Nigeria: A Genre Based Approach

This study examines the Universities’ Anthems in Nigeria as a distinct Genre. The present study analyzes a corpus composed of ten (10) anthems texts belonging to six federal Universities, two State owned Universities, and two private Universities in Nigeria. This study seeks to establish University anthems in Nigeria as a sub-genre of anthems by identifying the Generic structure Potential (GSP) of the selected university anthems as permitted by their contextual configuration (CC) following the theory of Halliday and Hasan (1985) as a theoretical framework for the study. The analysis in this study intends to come up with the total range of optional and obligatory elements in the University anthems analysed which are the possibilities of text structure for every text that can come up under the Genre of University anthem. The analysis revealed two obligatory elements -Identity/ Orientation IO* and Mission /Vision MV*- and five optional elements- Ideology (ID), Evocation/Eulogy (EE), Prayer (PR), Exhortation (EX), and Pledge/Allegiance (PA). The study concludes that even though University anthems, as a form of poem seemingly appear in different structures, there is a certain pattern of a Generic Structure that construes the purpose the anthems are intended to serve for the institutions; that is to communicate the identity of the institution.

Governmentality and comic propaganda: Mighty Man, the black superhero of apartheid

Recent years have seen growing academic interest in the proliferation of a distinct genre of African superheroes. There is, however, a much longer – and at times, problematic – history of superheroes in and from Africa, a history often heavily infused with colonial and imperial ideology. Using the 1970s South African Mighty Man comic book series, this article highlights how popular culture and media can be used as covert and mundane tool of governmentality. Mighty Man can be understood as a technique of power deployed in service of the apartheid regime's philosophy of separate development, illustrating the use of popular culture as a technology of (colonial) governmentality. The landscapes, narratives and additional content of Mighty Man were used in efforts to instil and frame a conduct of conduct amongst Black subjects – both in accepting separate development and the apartheid government, and in framing the everyday practices and dispositions that would allow for governing at a distance by the white minority regime. Mighty Man provides a powerful example of state-commissioned, covert comic propaganda which was indelibly framed by government policy and an ambition to create and impose a set of values and ideals around the dispositions, behaviour and actions of Black subjects. Ultimately, Mighty Man embodied a segregationist fantasy in which the absence of non-Black characters both denied the possibility of inter-racial contact and normalised social and spatial segregation – as well as class-based aspirations – while simultaneously promoting the conduct of conduct amongst subjects that would maintain these divisions. Through the construction of moral township landscapes, the Mighty Man series not only sought to regulate the conduct of the colonised subject through the condemning of ‘immoral’ behaviours but also attempted to offer illusory hopes of aspiration and freedom.

Children's Literature in the Nordic World by Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel

Reviewed by: Children's Literature in the Nordic World by Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel Marianne Stecher-Hansen (bio) Children's Literature in the Nordic World. By Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel. Aarhus University Press and University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. Children's Literature in the Nordic World serves as a concise introduction to children's reading cultures in the Nordic countries and demonstrates a significant evolution in reading practices, genres, and educational circumstances over the past 250 years. The book is co-authored by scholars at Aarhus University, Denmark: Nina Christensen, professor of children's literature and head of the Centre for Children's Literature and Media, and Charlotte Appel, professor of early modern cultural history. The work is published in the University of Wisconsin's small-book Nordic World series, as a co-publication with the Aarhus University Press; the series seeks to feature top thinkers in the Nordic countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland—in order to explore the region's history, culture, and values. Although the title Children's Literature in the Nordic World might suggest content from the entire Nordic region, which would include Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) as well as Finland, Iceland and Greenland, the study rests primarily on Denmark as "the main example" (7), making use of Danish children's books and Danish writers as case studies. That said, there are interspersed texts and examples from Norway (notably, that country was part of the Danish realm until 1814) as well as from [End Page 345] Sweden and Swedish-Finland mentioned in the study. In making use of the term children's literature, the title might also seem to suggest the analysis of literary texts for children; however, the study avoids close readings of the selected texts and media, instead focusing on the institutions, national policies, reading practices, and socio-economic circumstances that shaped the reading cultures of Nordic (i.e. mainly Danish) children. Christensen and Appel include precise descriptions of the material culture of children's literature and include a wide variety of texts, genres, and other media. The book includes good quality, color illustrations that accompany each chapter. The narrative is organized into six short chapters, each framed by the evolving conceptions of childhood in Scandinavia, from the Enlightenment to the present. The content of each chapter is illuminated by the legal, educational, and socio-economic developments in Scandinavian societies which determined children's reading practices, their access to books and materials, and their agency as citizens. The authors' approach involves opening each chapter with individual case studies that describe the reading practices and environments of two or three individual children (historical personages) of the respective eras, who are carefully selected to illustrate socio-economic and gender differences. In the opening three chapters, "Introduction," "Educating Young Hearts and Minds, 1750-1820" and " The Child as a Future Patriotic Citizen, 1820-1900," the authors illuminate the romantic concept of childhood which emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment and, subsequently, inspired the development of children's literature as a distinct genre (particularly via the popularized folk fairy tale) during the nineteenth century. In the opening chapter which explores the period 1750 to 1820, the humble childhood of the celebrated Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the son of an itinerate shoemaker, is effectively contrasted with that of the lesser-known Danish-German writer Friederike Bruun (1765-1835), a product of upper-class birth and private education. Scholars who are seeking a deeper discussion of H. C. Andersen's profound contribution as a radical innovator of children's literature via the fairy tale genre may be disappointed by this cursory treatment of his legacy, especially given that Andersen may be credited as the first modern writer to give voice and validation to the experiential world of the child. Nonetheless, the study does a fine job at painting a historical picture of children (such as young Andersen) as readers who were shaped and often limited by specific socioeconomic and material circumstances. Whereas the first half of the study delineates the gradual emergence of children as a new reading public and books for children as a distinct genre, the last three chapters depict a Nordic...

Development of Noun Phrase Complexity Across Genres in Children’s Writing

AbstractComplex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is both limited and dated. Moreover, some work has suggested that NP development is late-occurring and genre-specific, calling into question curricular guidance which specifies teaching from the earliest years and which makes no mention of genre. Analysing 240 texts written by children in England aged six to 16, this study shows that overall complexity develops at a roughly constant rate from primary school onwards. Increases are principally driven by postmodification, especially relative clauses and proposition phrases. By the end of their mandatory education, children make some use of genre distinctions evident in adult writing. However, there are also clear patterns of overuse and underuse of particular NP components. Key distinctive features are examined in context to understand the roles NP components play in writing development.

When the facts are not enough: the limitations of fact-checking sex education controversies

ABSTRACT School-based sex education has been a controversial issue in the province of Ontario, Canada. When an updated sex education curriculum was introduced by the provincial government in 2015, the media heavily covered negative reactions to the curriculum, and one distinct genre of reporting became modestly popular: the fact-checking article. These listicle-style articles presented and debunked common misunderstandings surrounding the curriculum and while they tried to appear as a neutral response to misinformation, fact-checking articles are no less value-laden than other responses to the curriculum. By examining two examples of these ‘fact-checking’ and ‘myth-busting’ articles published in The Toronto Star in 2015, I argue against the assumption that simply exposing the facts of a curriculum’s content is enough to dispel the deep anxieties that surround sexual values in a pluralistic democracy like Canada. This paper instead suggests that the reassurance provided by fact-checking obscures the ways that conflict and uncertainty might present opportunities rather than obstacles to creating and sustaining inclusive comprehensive sex education.

“A Friend of God and the Poor Wretched Blacks”: Violence, Race, and Redemption in Missionary Narratives of Nile Valley Slavery

Abstract This article explores narratives of slavery written by Christian missionaries in the Nile Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on works produced by the Italian Comboni mission, American Presbyterians, and the British Church Missionary Society, I approach missionary narratives of Nile Valley slavery as a distinct genre of storytelling shaped by the unique position of the missionary as a narrator and the symbolic utility of slavery as a vehicle for conveying suffering. Reading these sources critically, I argue that the slaves and former slaves that missionaries depicted in their writings served as a discursive canvas for missionaries to situate their activities in a world of suffering and violence. By positioning mission work alongside the material trials of slavery, missionaries lent a temporal urgency to their spiritual projects and justified their relationship with colonial violence.

Hong Kong vampire films: anxious imaginings of death and illness

ABSTRACT Much of the scholarship on the Hong Kong vampire film has analysed the genre as a type of ghost film, conflating the form of the vampire creature with the concept of the ghost. This paper takes a different approach in analysing the Hong Kong vampire film as a distinct genre. The vampire has a special physicality that is resurrected after death; it is an embodied entity that resembles a human and has developed through a cross-fertilization of Eastern and Western ideas. I explore the genre’s complexity in three ways. Firstly, I analyse its characteristics and cultural sources, placing emphasis on the Chinese vampire that provides the template for the Hong Kong form. Secondly, I examine Hong Kong vampire films through the lens of the imagining of rebirth in the funeral culture of Chinese Taoism. Thirdly, I consider the ‘metaphor of illness’ and the theme of identity crisis. Exploring films from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper shows how Hong Kong people found a way to reimagine rebirth and resurrection aside from the representation of ghosts. Furthermore, it analyzes how the genre represents the anxiety of the collective unconsciousness prior to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong.

From Pure Aesthetics to Sensory Gratification: Shifting Paradigm of Aesthetic Pleasure in Indian Popular Campus Fiction

This paper explores the shifting paradigm of ‘aesthetic pleasure’ in the field of popular literature with an emergence of cultural studies in Literary Theory. It focuses on the concept of pleasure as a significant measure in analyzing the origin and development of Indian popular campus fiction as a distinct genre. It examines how the concept of ‘pleasure’ has shifted from a purely aesthetic appreciation of the values of truth, beauty and goodness to the contemporary aspects of hedonistic and somatic pleasures in the works of popular arts. The paper also sheds light on various theories, propounded by different cultural critics like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal to analyze the ways the cultural industry has incorporated the values of enjoyment and entertainment into the aesthetic appreciation of pleasure, offering the emotional engagement of readers in these popular texts.

Political Extravaganzas and a Jonsonian Comedy

Political Extravaganzas and a Jonsonian Comedy

The Skin of Our Teeth, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

<i>The Skin of Our Teeth</i>, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Textual, Material, Visual: Exploring an Epigraphic Approach to the History of Imperial China

AbstractIn this article, I advance a recent epigraphic approach to historical study by foregrounding steles as a medium that functions both to communicate information and project authority publicly. Scholars taking this approach have explored distinctive genres of steles to transform our understanding of north China under Mongol rule. Through a case study, I show how a set of steles installed in the fifteenth-century rural world of north China transmitted authority and power not just through the content of their inscriptions but also through other written and unwritten information they stored. I give particular attention to the ways in which the inscriptions were materialized and visualized. In doing so, I argue that emphasizing the public communication function of steles challenges us to think beyond primary sources strictly in terms of their textual value to reflect more broadly on modes of transmission and the power dynamics contained within them.