Book Genre Research Articles

The Effect of Book Genre in Eliciting Teacher Math Talk

ABSTRACTNumber books are an effective tool to increase math talk and promote children's mathematical thinking, but little is known about book genre effects. How do different types of number books impact mathematical input? This study examined whether book genre affects the amount and types of teachers' math talk. Using a within‐subjects design, we asked 31 teachers of 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds to read a narrative number book and a nonnarrative number book in a counterbalanced order. The books were matched in target numerical content. We found that the nonnarrative number book elicited more math talk than the narrative number book. In a qualitative analysis, we analyzed multiple conversational turns and found that both books allowed teachers to engage in simple math discussions, but there were differences in other types of math discussions. Together, these findings show that the quantity and quality of mathematical input differ as a function of genre.

A Historical Examination of the Self-Help Book Genre: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Movements

The self-help book genre, encompassing works that offer practical guidance for personal growth and improvement, boasts a surprisingly long and rich history. While the term itself emerged in the 19th century, the underlying concept of sharing knowledge for self-betterment stretches back millennia. The present article delves into the evolution of the self-help genre, exploring its ancient roots, transformations through the ages, and its enduring popularity in the modern world.

Poetic ‘Hypertext’, Evocative ‘Figure-in-Landscape’, and the Reading of Illustrated Plays in the Late Ming

Abstract Scholars of late Ming print culture have noted a ‘scenic’ shift in book illustrations of the late Wanli period. But how did the ‘scenic’ style vary across different genres of books, and what impact did such variations have on reading? This article examines a series of drama illustrations attributed to the Hangzhou publisher Rongyu tang (RYT), and explores the RYT’s subtle reconfigurations of the relationships between figures, landscapes, and poetic captions to produce new experiences of reading plays. I argue that the RYT developed its own repertoire of ‘figures-in-landscape’ that, while intersecting with visual motifs in a wide range of paintings and prints, distinguish themselves through the fine-tuning of the relative size of figure to landscape and the integrating of poetic ‘hypertexts’. Through close examination of three figure types – traveler, fisherman, and female performer – in landscape, I show that the images gave rise to a poetically recollective, visually evocative, and culturally contextualized mode of reading that appealed to varying levels of knowledge and interests. They afforded readers the flexibility to immerse themselves in the atmosphere or emotions of select scenes, to reflect on the overarching themes of the plays, or to take an imaginative flight out of drama to appreciate the images’ broader poetic and visual associations.

COMICS AS A MEANS OF PRESERVING CLASSICAL LITERATURE IN MODERN PEOPLE’S READING (The case of W. Shakespeare)

The article focuses on adaptations of the tragedy “Hamlet” and the comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by W. Shakespeare in the form of comic books. The object of study is the peculiarities of comics as a text in demand by the representatives of clip consciousness, which is formed under the influence of the IT. The subject of study is the peculiarities of the source text transformation in comic adaptations of the 20th–21st centuries. The study is based on two adaptations of “Hamlet” and three adaptations of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by W. Shakespeare. The tasks of the study were as follows: to determine the connection between the comic book genre and clip consciousness; to highlight the characteristic features of the comics genre; to analyse the reflection of genre features in concrete texts; to describe changes in the source text depending on the nature of the audience. The study showed that the popularity of comics as a genre is inextricably linked with the emergence of clip consciousness. Certain features of the comics genre correlate with those of clip consciousness: fragmentation corresponds to mastering information in small portions, the emphasis on the visual presentation of information is associated with the perception of the world through visual images.

Learning-based dynamic pricing strategy with pay-per-chapter mode for online publisher with case study of COL

We consider how to make dynamic pricing decision for Chinese Online (COL) at T time-points, an online publisher that allow authors to sell their ongoing book projects. Instead of paying for a book, readers pay for each chapter (pay-per-chapter mode) of the ongoing book project. This mode allows readers to pay for as many chapters as they want without taking the risk that the releasing of new chapters might be delayed or stopped. Despite of the dynamics of chapter-by-chapter released of COL products, the fixed pricing strategy (FPS) does not make fully use of the reading data generated by releasing chapters of the ongoing book. We propose a learning-based dynamic pricing strategy (LDPS) that exploits the newly information to maximize cumulative revenue for the publisher. The LDPS captures the ever changing features of readers. It employs the Thompson sampling method to balance the exploration of investigating different prices sufficiently with the exploitation of settling on the optimal price. Taking COL as a case study and implementing our strategy in the context of the aforementioned real-life data set, we show that LDPS outperform several classical strategies such as Greedy, Prior-Free TS and Prior-Given TS, and average revenue of LDPS is increased by 0.5 % average per time-point compared to the publisher's historical decisions. We also provide some management implications for the COL publisher by analyzing the pricing range of different genres of books and the choice of the exploration threshold parameter.

Shared Book-Reading Amongst Parents of Autistic and Non-Autistic Children

ABSTRACT Shared book-reading (SBR) is a commonplace interaction in the home, yet for families with autistic children, little is known about the types of books parents read with their children, their frequency of reading these books, or how this routine relates to those in families with non-autistic children. This study thus compared the frequency of SBR amongst parents of autistic/non-autistic children, focusing on various book genres (narrative, informational, alphabet, wordless). We also took parents’ variables (age, education, self-efficacy) into consideration. Participants were 216 parents (183 mothers, 33 fathers): 74 with autistic children (Mage = 6.56, SD = 1.33), and 142 without an autism diagnosis (Mage = 4.79, SD = 1.30). Parents of autistic children read wordless picturebooks, narratives, and alphabet books significantly more frequently with their children than those without autism, with no significant differences in terms of overall frequency of SBR. Understanding how these variables relate and interact can facilitate the creation of programmes that more effectively support families’ promotion of children’s literacy development, especially children with autism.

Colonel Jan Breytenbach – Military Historian or Storyteller? An Analysis of Breytenbach’s Work using a Military History Conceptual Framework

Books on the South African Border War have flooded the popular market in the last two decades. Historians, journalists, and particularly ex-soldiers – often amateur writers – have tapped into the market. The genres of books include, but are not limited to, personal accounts, autobiographies, regimental histories, journalist accounts, and academic books. Jan Breytenbach was one of the first South African Defence Force officers to write about the Border War. He published seven books, and paved the way for many writers to follow in his footsteps. Most of his books focus on the history of 32 Battalion. Against this background, the study on which this article is based, aimed to analyse Breytenbach’s writing using a conceptual framework put forward by military historians.

Computational thematics: comparing algorithms for clustering the genres of literary fiction

What are the best methods of capturing thematic similarity between literary texts? Knowing the answer to this question would be useful for automatic clustering of book genres, or any other thematic grouping. This paper compares a variety of algorithms for unsupervised learning of thematic similarities between texts, which we call “computational thematics”. These algorithms belong to three steps of analysis: text pre-processing, extraction of text features, and measuring distances between the lists of features. Each of these steps includes a variety of options. We test all the possible combinations of these options. Every combination of algorithms is given a task to cluster a corpus of books belonging to four pre-tagged genres of fiction. This clustering is then validated against the “ground truth” genre labels. Such comparison of algorithms allows us to learn the best and the worst combinations for computational thematic analysis. To illustrate the difference between the best and the worst methods, we then cluster 5000 random novels from the HathiTrust corpus of fiction.

Recommended by Librarians

To study library guides, as published on Springshare’s LibGuides platform, new approaches are needed to expand the scope of the research, ensure comprehensiveness of data collection, and reduce bias for content analysis. Computational methods can be utilized to conduct a nuanced and thorough evaluation that critically assesses the resources promoted in library guides. Web-based library guides are curated by librarians to provide easy access to high-quality information and resources in a variety of formats to support the research needs of their users. Recent scholarship considers library guides as valuable resources and as de facto publications, highlighting the need for critical study. In this article, the authors present a novel model for comprehensively gathering data about a specific genre of books from individual LibGuide pages and applying computational methods to explore the resultant data. Beginning with a pre-selected list of 159 books, we programmatically queried the titles using the LibGuides Community search engine. After cleaning and filtering the resultant data, we compiled a list of 20,484 book references (of which 6,212 are unique) on 1,529 LibGuide pages. By testing against inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure relevancy, we identified a total of 281 titles relevant to our topic. To gain insights for future study, citation analysis metrics are presented to reveal patterns of frequency, co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling of books promoted in LibGuides. This proof-of-concept could be adopted for a variety of applications, including assessment of collections, public services, critical librarianship, and other complex questions to enable a richer and more thorough understanding of the information landscape of LibGuides.

The Making of Audiobook Platform of the Publishing Student's Final Project to Enhance the Reading Experience

The decreasing interest in reading books is the main indicator of the development of modern digital publishing. This shifting trend and function in reading books requires the innovation of printed books into a form of digital reading or audiobooks. Audiobooks can be a solution in increasing interest in reading. This research will discuss the process of creating an Audiobook Platform for the Final Project of Publishing Students to maximize the “Reading Experience.” The Final Project of Publishing students who will be converted are the prioritized children’s book genre, the aim is to increase the reading experience of readers, and reach a wider audience, such as children who cannot read yet, are blind, dyslexic, and graphia disabled readers. The work methods used are pre-production, production, and post-production. This research is a collaboration between lecturers across study programs and students of multimedia engineering technology publishing as a form of independent campus learning application. The results of applied research in this audiobook form are published on the mobile apps platform and website so that it is easy to access from anywhere and anytime.
 Keywords: audiobook, publishing, digital platform, childrens book, reading experience

The challenge of assessing academic books: The U.K. and Lithuanian cases through the ISBN lens

Abstract Books are an important output in many fields of research. However, they pose a significant challenge for research assessment systems, partly because of the limited availability of information to support the assessment of books. To inform book assessment practices, I present a systematic examination of the ISBN Manual and the Global Register of Publishers (GRP). I evaluate the extent to which these two sources can be used to determine the genre and publisher of a book as well as the country in which a book was issued. My analysis focuses on books submitted to the research assessment systems in Lithuania and the United Kingdom from 2008 to 2020. I show how the ISBN Manual captures the complex interactions between publishers, their imprints, and other organizations active in academic publishing, revealing the pitfalls of measuring books’ quality by their publisher’s prestige. The results also indicate that the ISBN standard provides no basis for the book genres mandated by research assessment systems in some countries. Finally, I demonstrate how the ISBN Manual and metadata accumulated in the GRP are convenient tools for designers of research assessment systems and are suitable for identifying ISBN registrants and performing bibliometric analysis.

Discourse Rules of a Book Essay and a Case Study for the Writing Classes in a University Curriculum of Liberal Arts

This thesis explored what the genre knowledge of the book essay is and its discourse rules in the writing classes in a University curriculum of a liberal arts program. Using an example of a class design for book essay writing, it presented the cases pertaining to how the learners internalized the discourse rules and reflected them into their book essays. It put forth an extensive approach, proposing that the discourse rules fall under the premise that the academic book essay belongs to an academic essay, which is located between book journals and academic theses. Also, it presented writing rules which can allow the writers to face their tasks using not only the approach of essays, but also an insight of criticism, using both formal and informal approaches. Learners were able to select their books in a self-directed manner, for the books were related to their own majors and thus were interesting to them. Moreover, they utilized the advantages of the free style forms of writing book essays by selecting their book genre without any restrictions. Also, the program respected the learners’ choices when it came to the components on book essays according to their reading materials by providing, as extensively and diversely as possible, each component in the ‘introduction’, ‘body’ and ‘conclusion’ respectively. Through connecting the writings to presentation classes, this strengthened the learners’ competency of understanding and criticism regarding the transference of their abilities as well as the reading materials and instructions in order for them to establish their authorships. Finally, the learners were able to internalize the discourse rules and they showed that they can reflect them into their writing on their own. This thesis furthermore suggested that the more genre-restricted discourse rules be researched in a more specific way.

Repurposing the book as a message: Italian lyric manuscripts in prison

AbstractMany manuscripts copied in various prisons have been identified. In the late Middle Ages, prisoners were allowed not only to compose new texts, but also to be employed as scribes. The present article focuses on three manuscripts produced in prison in the fifteenth century which pair Dante and Petrarch's lyric poems with the poetry of others and of the scribes themselves. These manuscripts combine lyric collections with personal works – lyric poems, letters, drawings – penned by those who made them, resulting in individual literary organisms. By exploring three case studies of Italian lyric manuscripts produced by incarcerated scribes, the article defines a ‘genre of book’ which combined personal interventions with lyric poetry of major authors, in a complex editorial process that made of the codex a new text in itself. They illuminate the ways in which the practice of assembling lyric poetry by major authors (chiefly Dante and Petrarch) combined with personal touches, was used by readers and compilers to craft a variety of identities; but most importantly, the ways in which the codex may become a performative event, as well as a site of memory and, when sent outside of prison, a message taking the form of the book.

An Imagined Shrinking Community: Japanese Nationalism and The Chronology of the Future

ABSTRACT How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan’s national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community.

REPREZENTACIJA RATA U SLIKOVNICAMA BEZ TEKSTA: ZAPITANOST, STRAH, BEZNAĐE I NADA

In this paper, we analyse ways of transposing emotionally delicate/traumatic content and their immersion within the (assumed) discourse of children’s literature, using the genre of wordless picture books as an example. The first part of the paper introduces theoretical perspectives on the challenges of incorporating war themes into children’s literature, as well as the genre-specific characteristics of wordless picture books. Given that the treatment of war themes in wordless picture books has not been extensively explored in academic discussions, the central focus of the paper revolves around two case studies: Why? (1995) (Warum?) by Nikolai Popov and The Yellow Butterfly (2022) (Жовтий метелик) by Oleksandr Shatokhin. The research aims to demonstrate the significance of wordless picture books as a medium that enables both young and adult readers to gain a deeper understanding of the traumatic experience of war. This is achieved through the narrativization of emotions within the wordless picture books and by fostering empathy towards (fictional) victims.

К ВОПРОСУ О ЖАНРЕ PASSIO PERPETUAE ET FELICITATIS

Early Christian genres called in antiquity “passions” and “martyrias” or “acts” had no clear genre boundaries. Neither literary frameworks were established, nor fidelity to generic canon was much important to Christians who wrote about martyrdom. They often wrote epistles because they wanted to tell their fellow believers about the deeds of the martyrs, often relied on authentic records of trials and eyewitness accounts, often praised the passion-bearers, and used martyrologies as liturgical texts. Martyrology gradually developed into hagiography with its subgenres. But even against this background, the “Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas” demonstrates exclusively elusive generic nature. The traditional title “Passio” corresponds to the content of the text under discussion. However, the work is made up of many parts written by different authors, not simultaneously, and combined into a single book. At least five persons were involved in the compilation of this set of documents (the communis opinio – three persons). These five had different statuses and different tasks. Theologue and author of the Prologue and Epilogue preached and glorified the martyrs, Perpetua created extragenre commentaria or hypomnemata for her congregation about the events of the prison, mainly about her dreamy visions given to her by the Holy Spirit: a heavenly journey, two journeys to the underworld, and a symbolic dream of the coming martyrdom as a victory over the devil. The Vision of Saturus has apocalyptic features, but what he saw he saw as if already beyond his earthly life; the Eyewitness created an account of what happened in the prison and in the arena, very vivid, but not fulfilling the minimum conditions of acts and martyrdoms: interrogation, sentence, burial, cult. The fifth author brought all the texts together and provided explanatory inserts, thus turning the whole functionally into an epistle that could be sent from Carthage to the larger world to be read in the Church. The result is a genre to which there are no analogues in ancient literature, and attempts to define this book through the genres of ancient literature both as a whole and in parts are unsuccessful. However, the genre of the documentary book, written by different authors at different times, in different genres, including apocalyptic, acts and passions, sermons, epistles, and visions, had emerged by the time of our Passio as the whole collection of the New Testament, with all the disparate texts, though independent, all dealing with one great event: the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and the establishment of his church. It served as a model for the compilation of the “Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas”.

ИСТОРИЯ ВОЗНИКНОВЕНИЯ И РАЗВИТИЯ КОМИКСА В США

The article provides a historical overview of such a literary and artistic phenomenon as a comic book in the United States of America. The most popular definition of a comic book in special literature to date has been characterized. The history of the appearance of the comic book and its individual artistic features are examined in detail. Conclusions have been drawn about the origin of comics in Europe and their gradual spread to the United States. The most significant works of European authors (R. Töpfer, W. Busch) and the first American authors (R. Outcolt, W. Mackay and G. Herriman) are considered. It is shown how, after the first stages of development, a specific, purely American comic book genre began to form - superhero comics (superheroics) and its influence on the entire further history of these works in America. The periodization of the history of the comic book by "centuries," characteristic features of comics of each century, the most iconic or typical works of each of these periods, is considered. In addition, the works of the most iconic and important authors and artists of the superhero comic book genre are considered and the development of other comic book genres, as well as the influence of the state and the specific historical situation on the subject of works, are characterized. The article is based on scientific and popular science literature on the topic of research.

Australian children’s picture books, the Frontier Wars, and Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces

Frank Uhr and Debra O’Halloran’s Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain (2019) is one of the few children’s picture books that explore the Australian Frontier Wars. In terms of message, the author and illustrator subsume First Nations’ resistance into the nation’s broader celebration of its participation in foreign wars. In terms of medium, they use the overwhelmingly conservative genre of picture books to deradicalise a potentially controversial topic, one that they frame using Joseph Campbell’s conception of the monomyth. Campbell’s development of the monomyth, widely referred to by his major work The hero with a thousand faces (1949/2008) was drawn from his sustained academic study of comparative mythology. He found a similar pattern emerging in a multitude of story forms, fairy tales, songs, and sonnets, and within sacred writings, dreamings, and monologue accounts. The canonical narrative arc of the hero’s journey has three core elements. It begins as the hero receives a ‘call to adventure’ and leaves the ordinary world (Separation or Departure). He or she enters an extraordinary world that requires engagement in a range of trials and challenges (Initiation), before returning home to the ordinary world, irreversibly transfigured (Return). Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain is framed by this trajectory, thereby ensuring a familiarity that belies the reader’s lack of knowledge as to its origin. The author and illustrator thereby avoid too overt a challenge to the ideological and genre-based expectations of their readers.

Evolution of the English Language, Nonfiction, Near Death Experience Book Genre Over the Past Fifty Years.

This study looks at the evolution of the nonfiction English language near death experience (NDE) book genre over the past 50years. The key research aim was to identify subgenres of NDE books to better understand how the epistemology of NDEs has been shaped by the popular literature. The study employed a qualitative methodology and was both inductive and deductive. World Cat and Library of Congress databases were used to identify printed and digital books, as well as textbooks, published on the NDE topic. Each book was coded to classify it within a specific subgenre. Findings showed that the largest subgenre of English language NDE books has been the experiencer account, whether written in an autobiographical or biographical format. Other large subgenres have included scientific investigations, religiously oriented books (especially Christian), and books exploring the personal aftereffects of NDEs. Subgenres that have emerged in recent decades include compilations of "lessons" from NDEs, books written by neuroscientists, and books written by medical practitioners about patient experiences. The author concludes that public knowledge about NDEs has been greatly shaped by experiencer accounts published in books. Furthermore, the emergence of new subgenres of NDE books, and the growth of others, signals ongoing change in the epistemology of the phenomenon. Reflexive practice was central to the development of the final manuscript. Reflexivity is seamlessly integrated throughout the paper and demonstrates how the author's familiarity with the book genre, and the NDE subject in general, shaped the development and conduct of this study.

Жанр графического романа: к постановке проблемы (на материале современных франко- и англоязычных текстов)

The aim of the research is to determine the features of the graphic novel as an independent genre in the modern literary process. The novelty of the research lies in conducting a detailed theoretical study of literary criticism publications on the theory of genres, on the history of the comic book genre and the genre of the novel by Russian and foreign scholars, which made it possible to identify similarities and differences between the graphic novel and the comic book based on the dialogue between text and image, as well as to consider the graphic novel as a modification of the genre of the novel inheriting its main characteristics (the presence of the narrative structure and plot, the development of the main character, the chronotope, the dialogue with modernity, etc.). The authors of the study, defining the comic book as a meta-genre, come to the conclusion that at present, it seems reasonable to consider the graphic novel not as a subgenre of the comic book, but as an independent hybrid genre undergoing evolution. It is the first time that the subgenres of the graphic novel have been distinguished on the basis of French-language and English-language works. As a result, it has been proved that the graphic novel can be defined as an independent genre that is already undergoing changes, breaking up into subgenres in which the tendency to the crossing of different genre forms is noticeable.