Genre and ...

Genres are everywhere and we all know how to use them. However, they are also elusive and hard to describe. We act and interact through genre, understand through genre, and organize through genre, but we have a hard time defining individual genres, and an even harder time understanding what a genre is and what a genre does. Therefore, genre is a central concept in many areas of scholarship today and is interlinked with many other central scholarly concepts, but its core function is still a subject of debate, and its connections with other core concepts remain sorely under-examined. Genre and … explores these connections in a series of articles that each analyzes the relationship between genre and one other central scholarly concept: conversation, rhetoric, categorization, paratext, interpretation etc., with examples spanning from Sherlock Holmes and avantgardistic literature to car commercials. The authors of the present volume have a common starting point in Scandinavian Studies, but span a wide field of scholarly tradition. Thus, taken together the articles in Genre and … are representative of an expanding and intriguing professional genre network

From whodunnits to literary fiction: The charting of an author’s transition from crime writer to literary novelist

The study examines the nature and functioning of genre in the commercial marketplace and the negotiations concerning genre labelling that a contemporary writer must undertake in relation to publishers’ decisions, reader expectations and critical responses. Part One assesses and theorises some problems of genre by means of an exploration of the terms ‘crime fiction’ and ‘literary fiction’. Focusing on the perceived conventions and boundaries of the two genres and some important sub-genres, it explores the extent to which such perceptions not only reinforce the notion of a divide between novels labelled as ‘crime’ and novels labelled as ‘literary’, but also perpetuate a debate about the ranking of texts on a ladder of literary merit. Part Two is a self-reflective critical appraisal of my eight novels, written over the fifteen-year period between 1998 and 2013, which underwent this process of commercial classification in both Britain and America, the main English language markets in which they were published. It offers a literary analysis of the novels in the context of their critical reception and in the light of my growing perception of the limitations of crime genre conventions on my choices as a writer and, incrementally, my attempts to outdistance those limitations. Part Three consists of conclusions: these concern the influence of a reader’s knowledge of genre on the reading experience as well as on reader expectations, the influence of a writer’s reputation for one kind of fiction on any aspiration to be recognised as having written another, and the tension, in the lived experience of a fiction writer, between the theoretical fluidity of genre boundaries and their rigidity in practice

Drama in the dailies : violence and gender in Dutch newspapers, 1880 to 1930

This thesis looks at the representation of violence in Dutch newspapers during the rise of the mass media in the Netherlands, from 1880 to 1930. Newspaper circulations shot up and newspapers increasingly targeted women readers and the working class. The thesis examines how these changes affected press coverage of sexual and family violence, crimes that involved women either as the victim or the perpetrator. A key question was whether public condemnation of male violence against women increased during this period, as has been argued by some historians.I find that newspaper reporting on partner violence and sexual violence increased after 1880, and the reports became more sympathetic to the women involved. I argue that this was in part because such human-interest stories were thought to appeal to the new target segment of women readers. However, journalists never treated such violence as a social problem and they often romanticized or trivialized assaults by men. Moreover, crime news was mediated by the sources and shaped by distinctive features of the Dutch criminal justice system.Cities, Migration and Global Interdependenc

The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by The Wellcome Trust. The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind charts changing cultural understandings of dementia and alzheimer’s disease in scientific and cultural texts across the 20th Century. Reading a range of texts from the US, UK, Europe and Japan, the book examines how the language of dementia – regarding the loss of identity, loss of agency, loss of self and life – is rooted in scientific discourse and expressed in popular and literary texts. Following changing scientific understandings of dementia, the book also demonstrates how cultural expressions of the experience and dementia have fed back into the way medical institutions have treated dementia patients. The book includes a glossary of scientific terms for non-specialist readers