Book Genre Research Articles

Types and Genre Specificity of the Comics in Ukraine

The article is devoted to the coverage of the main trends in the comics’ development in Ukraine from the standpoint of its types and genre specificity. The increase of comic books popularity as an information product on the domestic book publishing market has been revealed. Based on the analysis of statistical data, the tendency to increase both the number of names of domestic comics and the number of publishers specializing in comics’ products has been shown. The perspectives of comics as a tool for engaging in reading in an informative society have been substantiated. An attempt to classify comics in Ukraine by format, genres and originality (translated, adaptations of classic and contemporary Ukrainian literary works, original ones) has been made. The development of the domestic comic book market towards more expensive and better products – production of graphic novels has been revealed. The peculiarities of different types of domestic comics are revealed, the influence on the popularity of historical and heroic types of comic books of social and political processes, in particular the events of the Revolution of Dignity and War in the East of Ukraine, has been emphasized, the attempt to create a national pantheon of superheroes has been reviewed. The educational functions of comics in Ukraine, modernization and integration of comics by means of modern social contexts that are important in terms of national identity have been underlined. Against the backdrop of the growing popularity and the fantasy comic book genre development and widespread presence on the book market of historical and heroic comics, the decline of the humorous comic book in Ukraine has been noted. Such forms and means of comic book promotion and dissemination of comics’ culture in Ukraine as festivals, blogs, thematic evenings, presentations, special Internet resources have been substantiated. It has been determined that cinema is a powerful means of promoting comics.

Shared Reading Extratextual Talk With Children With Autism Who Have Spontaneous Speech

Shared reading is a developmentally appropriate practice that supports children’s emergent literacy and language development. Participation in shared reading, however, may be compromised for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) due to social-communication difficulties inherent to the disorder. The primary aim of this study was to explore the extent to which children with ASD who have spontaneous verbal language engage in shared reading with caregivers. A total of 37 caregivers and their children ( n = 17 ASD; n = 20 with typical development [TD]) read nine books representing three different genres (i.e., familiar, non-fiction, fiction). Analyses revealed no differences between the groups in the quantity of adult questions asked, frequency of child-initiated comments or questions, and overall levels of child responsiveness to adults. Children with ASD showed greater responsiveness to adult questions during familiar books compared with either non-fiction or fiction genres, in contrast to TD children wherein responsiveness did not differ across book genres. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for designing shared reading interventions for children with ASD who have spontaneous verbal language.

My Two-Minute Drill (Lapels and All)

My Two-Minute Drill (Lapels and All)

On the Forms and Content of Moral Instruction in School Books and Children’s Reading Books of the 16th to the Early 19th Centuries. Part I

School institutions of various levels were one of the important agents of the moral reform movement characterizing early modern European society. Schools instilled certain moral values and models of decent behavior also through elementary textbooks and children’s reading books. Despite significant conservatism of this book production, its analysis for a long period of time allows to notice several changes: in the method of reasoning about the virtuous and vicious; argumentation in favor of certain patterns of behavior; the emergence of new thematic blocks that verifies the influence of philosophical thought of that era on educational literature. The first part of the study analyzes the main forms of instructive material in school books and children’s reading books. Collections of Biblical excepts, religious-moralistic proverbs and maxims (Spruchbücher), catalogues of obligations (in form of the so-called “house-tables” (Haustafel) and threefold duties in relation to God, himself, and the neighbor), rules of decorum, instructive stories, virtuous examples, instructive visual images and collections of allegorical pictures-emblems – all these forms go back to various book genres, could coexist in the same textbook or compete with each other.

Функционирование литературных антропонимов в произведениях Э. Канетти и К. Хоффера

The author studies the works of Austrian writers Elias Canetti “Earwitness. 50 characters” (“Der Ohrenzeuge. 50 Charaktere”) and Klaus Hoffer “In Graz” (“Bei den Bieresch”). The relevance of the study is determined by the need to comprehend the literary process of Austria in the second half of the twentieth century. A review of the existing points of view regarding the significance of the analyzed works of both authors and in modern Austrian literature is performed. The debatable nature of Canetti's book genre and the originality of the poetics of the Hoffer novel are noted. The authors of the article proceed from the fact that Canetti's work is a “collection” of literary miniatures; Hoffer's novel can be considered as an example of the initial stage of development of German-language postmodern literature. The narrative strategies used by Canetti and Hoffer to create a surrealistic context and “fantastic reality” are drawn into consideration. The authors dwell on the study of the functioning of literary anthroponyms in the text space of works. It is proved that fictional onomastics is involved in the creation of semantic multidimensionality of a literary text. Hoffer’s novel traces Canetti’s borrowed method of creating a verbal image with enriched contextual semantics using proper names. The translation aspect remains outside the scope of the article.

Att översätta faktaböcker för barn : Om textuell, interpersonell och innehållslig anpassning

Research on children's literature mainly involves literary texts. This article focuses on the underresearched genre of information books, and analyses the Swedish translation of a French informatio ...

Подросток как читатель: возможности педагогического влияния

The relevance of the research is related to the need to develop pedagogical strategies for the formation of reading generations. The analysis of domestic studies of reading of teenagers for the last 50 years is carried out. We identify and describe the basic characteristics of teenagers reading behavior. Research results show that reading occupies a fairly stable place among the priority forms of leisure activities, despite the growing diversity and availability of other forms of leisure time. But due to the psychological and physiological characteristics of adolescence, their dynam-ism, it is not its main form. It is shown that the reading intensity of teenagers changes under the in-fluence of the social situation. The development of computer technologies, the increase in educa-tional loads, and the general lack of time reduce reading activity, but do not exclude teenagers from reading activities in general. The repertoire of teenager reading is gradually narrowing, limited to 2–3 genres. It is established that the top three most influential agents of influence on teenager reading include friends, parents, and teachers. Conclusions are drawn about the need for pe-dagogical support of teenagers reading activity. The main pedagogical tasks are defined: formation of teenagers’ awareness of the value of reading as a way of intellectual leisure, maintaining the balance of entertainment and cognitive motives for reading, expanding the genre and thematic repertoire of books read.

Audience, Genre, and Accuracy in Coronavirus: A Book for Children

:“Coronavirus departs from some conventions of the picture book genre. For instance, it does not have named characters, although some of the same children appear regularly in the illustrations. In addition, it does not tell a narrative. Rather, the question/answer format makes readers perceive they are hearing professional information delivered in a straightforward manner. This informational purpose requires many more words per page than in most picture books…. Five words and phrases are bolded throughout the book: virus, completely new, antibodies, ventilator, and vaccine. This emphasis builds vocabulary and provides context for when children will hear these words in other contexts.”

From the Editor's Gable

A kind of serendipity—“unexpected good luck,” as vocabulary.com would have it—often seems to me to be at work in the business of publishing and editing, and so it was with this issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Four excellent essays emerged from the review process and arrived at the editor's doorstep for collection and publication in this volume; of those four, three take up, in a variety of ways and from different perspectives, the central concern of Hawthorne's narrators and their relationship to their tales, its characters, and, perhaps, the author himself. This investigation of the topic begins with Michael Colacurcio's “The Teller and the Tale: A Note on Hawthorne's Narrators,” which traces and interrogates Hawthorne's dodgy narrators from some of the author's earliest works, like the aborted “Story Teller” collection, The Twice-told Tales, and Mosses, straight on through to The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. In the process, he zeroes in on a dominant and pesky conundrum for readers: whom, or what, does one trust when reading Hawthorne, “the teller” or “the tale”? For as we well know, the two are often at odds, or seem to be.Rachel Boccio comes at the question from a different angle on a single story. In “‘What Sort of Man Was Wakefield?’: Selfhood and Sovereignty in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-told Tale,” Boccio looks at character, narrator, and, ultimately, author, through the interesting lens of concepts of privacy and sovereignty. While Wakefield, she argues, “is unable to sustain ‘his right mind’” after divorcing himself from society and others—a kind of “hyperbolic account of the effect of privacy”—the narrator, on the other hand, “as storyteller and as urban spectator, is … a form of … the authoritative, self-determined, personal sovereign.” Boccio further contends that “Wakefield” iterates Hawthorne's “astute suspicions,” not only about privacy gone wrong, or intense isolation, but also about notions of the sovereignty of the self. Next, Zachary Williams, in “Slowing Down the War: The Sauntering Gaze of Hawthorne's Peaceable Man,” takes up the case of the vexed and vexing “Chiefly About War Matters,” a piece that has stirred strong and contradictory responses since its publication in 1862. Employing yet another tack, Williams connects this essay and its narrator to the genre and fictional narrators of Washington Irving's Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. He finds, interestingly, that Hawthorne utilizes the “leisurely” pace of Irving's sketches and the “sauntering gaze[s]” of their narrators as a kind of “aesthetic response” and intervention “to the accelerated temporalities of the war: the speed of modernization … and the rush toward partisanship and absolutism in wartime.”The last of the four essays in this volume, Judith A. Richardson's “Nathaniel Hawthorne's Secret Garden,” diverts our attention to an entirely different (and still under-studied) element of Hawthorne's writings: the author's “plant-mindedness.” Providing a brief overview of the prevalence of plant and vegetable matter in the fiction, followed by a concentrated enquiry into its place in The House of the Seven Gables, Richardson poses the pertinent question: “Why is Nathaniel Hawthorne—the Man of Mosses, as Melville referred to him … so mossy?. … What happens when we keep the plants in view?” Richardson reaches deep for her answers to this question, including her contention that “rather than being our allegorist-in-chief, [Hawthorne] is instead taking aim per se at the overdetermined metaphorizing, abstracting, or sermonizing usages of plants … in the American culture of his day.”The issue concludes with a book review, the annual “Current Bibliography” and news relevant to Hawthorne Society members and Review subscribers, as announced in “Along the Wayside.” To share with the Society news, events of interest, calls for papers, etc., please submit such announcements to Associate Editor James Hewitson at jhewitso@utk.edu or jk.hewitson@gmail.com.As always, I recognize with gratitude the invaluable work of my editorial staff, James Hewitson and Michael Demson; my research assistant, Em Lawrence; and the generous support of my institution, Sam Houston State University; my Dean, Dr. Abbey Zink; and my chair, Dr. Jacob Blevins. Many thanks, all.I also wish to thank members of the Society and subscribers to the Review for their patience as NHR has made the switch to another publishing home—Penn State University Press—and to provide a few reminders of new processes. To submit a manuscript for review, go to editorialmanager.com/hawthorne, where you will enter information and upload your document. If you need assistance or encounter difficulties, you may contact me directly at eng_jeh@shsu.edu or James Hewitson (e-mail above). Changes of address should be sent to: The Johns Hopkins University Press, P.O. Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211. Individual memberships should be sent to Christopher Diller, PhD, Treasurer, Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, Professor of English, Berry College,Mt. Berry, GA 30149. For information, contact Chris Diller at cdiller@berry.edu.

The World in a Book: The Creation of the Global in Sixteenth-Century European Costume Books*

Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations advised would-be explorers in their mission to discover a north-eastern passage to China to carry with them two types of book. The first was an updated ‘new Herball and such books as make shew of Herbes, Plantes, Trees, Fishes, Foules, and Beastes of all Regions’. The second type of book to be used ‘to astonish the natives’ and as a reference guide to foreign lands was what Hakluyt called ‘the book of the attire of all nations’.1 Hakluyt referred to what today are commonly called costume books, collections of the costumes of different people in Europe and other parts of the world. By the time Hakluyt published the first edition of his travel narratives in 1589, at least a dozen such costume books had been published in France, Italy and Germany in the previous twenty-five years.2 In the following decade the genre of the costume book reached maturity with the publication of Cesare Vecellio’s two editions of his Habiti antichi et moderni, comprising more than four hundred plates each.3

Peripheral hearing: ‘collaborative audio literature’ and the uncanny

This (self-exegetical) essay concerns ‘collaborative audio literature’, a form of asynchronous collaborative practice that brings together music, sound design, and literary texts. As a form of literary audio ‘content’, such a genre is peripheral to the mainstream audio literary genres of audio books and podcasts. Collaborative audio literature exists at the periphery of performance, literature, sound design, and music, as an experimental, interdisciplinary form. After a discussion of the relationship between music and sounded poetry, this essay discusses ‘Three Sisters’ (from my album The Double, 2017), an audio work based in part on Maria Takolander’s short story of that name (2013). In ‘Three Sisters’, I undertake an innovative form of adaptation that employs sampling and text-to-speech synthesis to place the newly produced text in a complex sonic field of music and sound design. The ‘un-performability’ of this piece (and others from The Double) is central to the work’s aesthetic, in which literature and music occupy virtual, peripheral spaces. The use of voices (synthetic and real) at the threshold of hearing also produces an aesthetic of ambiguity with regard to the usual predominance of words. ‘Three Sisters’, then, works with ambiguous, threshold spaces that test the limits of perception, authorship, genre, and the categories of literature and music themselves. The essay analyses my creative practice via the trope of the periphery-as-uncanny, a virtual space that evokes the disquieting interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Character networks and book genre classification

We compared the social character networks of biographical, legendary and fictional texts in search for marks of genre differentiation. We examined the degree distribution of character appearance and found a power-law-like distribution that does not depend on the literary genre. We also analyzed local and global complex network measures, in particular, correlation plots between the recently introduced Lobby index and degree, betweenness and closeness centralities. Assortativity plots, which previous literature claims to separate fictional from real social networks, were also studied. We found no relevant differences among genres for the books studied when applying these network measures and we provide an explanation why the previous assortativity result is not correct.

The Construction of Pious Children in Serial Salman Dan Hamzah

Children’s literature is often used as a medium for teaching values, for example
 religious values, in order to shape children’s character based on the understanding or
 ideology of certain groups. Through religious-based children’s literature, the figure of
 a religious ideal child was created and called a pious child. This example is applied by
 Salafi Islamic groups in Indonesia. The group that bases its teachings from the Salaf
 creates Islamic children’s book genre called ”Sunna children’s book”. The method
 used in this article is library-based qualitative research. Studies of pious character
 in European minority Muslim children’s literature have been widely carried out by
 Green-Oldendorf (2011), Shavit (2016) and Janson (2017), while studies of pious children
 in Indonesian contexts have only been done little, including this article. Textual study on
 the construction of pious children character is carried out according to the concept of
 ideal child in children’s literature by Purbani (2009), children book illustration and visual
 by Nodelman (2004), and pious Muslim child and childhood by research approach
 (Hendra-Priadi, 2019 and Scourfield et. al., 2013). The result of the research shows
 that pious children are represented through the main character who is very diligent
 in worshiping, behaving well, and obedient to parents. In addition, the construction of
 pious children in Serial Salman dan Hamzah is based on Salafi ideology concept of
 tarbiyah (education) that textually refers to the Quran and Hadith.

Reaching Excellence: Staff Weapon Typologies, Contexts, and Fighting Techniques in the Collectanea of Pietro Monte

Abstract The sixteenth-century Collectanea of the condottiero Pietro Monte contains some of the most thorough writings that exist pertaining to the use of staff weapons. A detailed study of how these weapons are categorised, contextualised, and used in Monte’s work can, due to their sometimes limited treatment in other fight books, allow for a comparative approach between Monte’s works and those of other fight book authors. Such a study allows for a more complete understanding of how Monte’s work fits in with the wider fight book genre, properly contextualising the Collectanea, and demonstrating to what extent this important but often overlooked text should be considered revolutionary or reflective of contemporary military and martial trends. In this article is discussed Monte’s approach to defining staff weapons, his contextualisation of staff weapons according to military and martial environments, and Monte’s teachings on the use of staff weapons.

Ideology through Modalities: Can the Translator Preserve Them?

The study explores on the application of modality reflecting the ideology by the author, Dale Carnegie, in ‘How to tn Friends and Influence People’ book and how the translator rendered them through the selection of translation techniques into Bagaimana Mencari Kawan dan Mempengaruhi Orang Lain . By carrying Teun A. Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model in determining the ideology and Simpson’s Language, Ideology and Point of View in determining the modality, we analyse the ideological expressions applied through the modalities and the Indonesian translated version. Dijk’s model was chosen since it represents the genre of this book that he brings a great theme to his ideology by directing it to social cognition. The modalities found in this research are epistemic, boulomaic, evaluative adjective, evaluative adverb and deontic. These modalities were translated into Indonesian using 10 (ten) translation techniques initiated by Molina & Albir (2002) and rated with the model of translation quality assessment from Nababan et al. (2012). The techniques which lead to the good of translation quality were established equivalent, transposition, amplification, (obligatory) modulation, and compensation. In general, the translator has been able to render the author's ideology manifested in modalities by applying these translation techniques. Thus, translator’s competency in choosing the right translation techniques shows his or her capability in comprehending the context of situation, elements of ideology in accordance with the genre, function and communicative purpose of the text.

Intertemporal Price Discrimination with Complementary Products: E-Books and E-Readers

This paper studies intertemporal price discrimination (IPD) with complementary products in the context of e-readers and e-books. Using individual-level data (2008–2012), I estimate a dynamic demand model for e-reader adoption and subsequent book quantity, reading format, and retailer choices in several book genres. I use the estimates to simulate a monopolist’s optimal dynamic pricing strategies when facing forward-looking consumers. The results illustrate how skimming/penetration pricing incentives for e-readers and harvesting/investing incentives for e-books interact in this novel setting. The optimal joint IPD strategy is skimming for e-readers and investing for e-books. Counterfactual results suggest that combining IPD with complementary product pricing improves firm profitability because it attenuates the limitations of each pricing approach. In a single-product IPD setting, firms’ pricing power is limited when consumers anticipate future price changes and delay purchases. Adding complementary products offers firms two pricing instruments; opposite price trajectories provide conflicting incentives for consumers, limiting intertemporal arbitrage. In a static complementary product setting, firms’ pricing power is limited when the relative elasticity between the two products is heterogeneous and conflicting among consumers. Adding IPD sorts heterogeneous consumers into different periods and reduces the need to balance across consumer types. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.

Educational history in the age of apology

Reconciliation processes – wherein governments and other organizations examine their past institutional practices to understand contemporary problems in relation to minorities or indigenous groups – have become a widespread international phenomenon in recent decades. In Sweden, such an ongoing process is the reconciliation work between the Church of Sweden and the Sami. In this process, which recently resulted in the publication of a scholarly anthology (or a “white book”), educational history has come to play a vital part. The present article uses the Church of Sweden’s White Book as an empirical object of study to examine in more detail the role and significance of knowledge of educational history for this specific reconciliation process. By focusing on various scientific complexities and epistemological tensions that tend to arise in these kinds of undertakings, this paper also aims to problematize the white book genre itself as a path to historical knowledge. By doing this, this article’s overall ambition is to contribute to future scholarly work in reconciliation activities, white papers and truth commissions. This study applies a qualitative content analysis and connects theoretically to the growing field of transitional justice research.

Networked Nation: Mapping German Cities in Sebastian Munster's ‘Cosmographia’ By Jasper van Putten

In 1550, Sebastian Münster published the fifth edition of his Cosmographia and, with its ‘new beautiful illustrations and maps’, turned it into an international bestseller. He did this by putting together a network of contributors, a group who have attracted interest from book historians including Elizabeth Eisenstein and David Woodward. Based on his Ph.D. dissertation, Jasper van Putten here examines the German views and their network of makers, to question how the creators of the views expressed German identity in them. Between discussions of Münster and his printer, Heinrich Petri, van Putten has chapters on the other professions involved in putting the book together: the artists, middlemen, patrons, draftsmen, and woodcutters, and useful tables listing all these individuals, along with the sources of each view. He discusses the unusual way in which the views were financed, each by an individual patron who was then named and received a complimentary copy of the work. He shows how the convergence of changes in the book market and in European politics led to the obsolescence of the Cosmographia after its final edition of 1628. Neverthless, as van Putten shows, the genre of city books that followed, with views and brief descriptive texts, organized to reflect the territorial states that were evolving, originated in Münster's work.

The Transatlantic Reception of The Chronicles of Narnia and of C. S. Lewis as a Children’s Book Author in the 1950s and 1960s, Compared

This article argues that C. S. Lewis’s status as a children’s book author, as well as the reception of his Narnia books, should be considered anew in light of the history of children’s books in the early and mid-twentieth century. I suggest that the roots of The Chronicles of Narnia lay in part in Lewis’s reactions to a perceived neglect of the children’s book genre by the literary elite and that differences in the transatlantic reception of these books may be mapped onto the historical particularities of children’s books and their gatekeepers in the decades around the series’ publication

Do Readers Judge Books by Author Gender? Results from a Randomized Experiment

We run a randomized experiment to examine gender discrimination in book purchasing with 2,544 subjects on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We manipulate author gender and book genre in a factorial design to study consumer preferences for male versus female versus androgynous authorship. Despite previous findings in the literature showing gender discrimination in book publishing and in evaluations of work, respondents expressed no gender preference across a variety of measures, including quality, interest, and the amount they were willing to pay to purchase the book. This nonfinding, if it holds up to additional research, suggests that book consumers may not express the same discriminatory tendencies observed among indie and traditional publishers.