The concept of genre is as old as literary theory itself, but centuries of debate haven’t produced much consensus on the topic. Part of the reason is that genre looks like a different thing at different points in the life of a text. Scholars of rhetoric tend to focus on the patterns of communicative action that produce memoranda or tragedies (Devitt 2004; Miller 1984). Sociologists are sometime...

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, crime fiction is a topranking literary genre, and has become part of mainstream culture. The crime novel’s position of pre-eminence derives from its broad fan base and its readership, with publishing houses devoting whole series and large print runs to the genre. Evidence of the prevalence of a popular obsession with crime stories is also to be foun...

In the following discussion I will examine the application of Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance to genre theory. Despite its popularity among literary theorists, there is sometimes a discrepancy between the loose concept of family resemblance, at least in its negative-radical version, and the practical assumptions made about genres. In order to overcome the inadequacies of existing a...

Literary journalism, a hybrid writing style that borrows techniques from journalism and prose fiction, is being scrutinized as literature since its conception in early twentieth century. This kind of genre when read, arouse in readers the feelings of empathy and rejoining with their own experiences and sensations. Taking some fitting examples of this genre from American literature, the purpose ...

The vast diversity of the proposed definitions of parody, both before and after the twentieth century, can be an emblem of the lack of a thorough agreement amongst the literary critics about the definition of this literary technique (genre?!). While there is not a comprehensive all-accepted definition of parody, modern and postmodern literatures both exhibit a wide application of it. After look...

Abstract This article focuses on late Ottoman/Turkish translations of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (“quatrains”) as part Perso-Ottoman poetic connectivity in the early twentieth century. Situating reception at nexus world literature, literary historiography, and translatability, explores methodological affordances translation to redress overdominance discursive historical points rupture studies Pers...

This study examines how reading habits affect people’s sensitivity to word distributions in literary and non-literary writing. We manipulated eight literary and non-literary passages, creating modified versions that had lower word chunk frequencies but higher individual word frequencies than the originals. Subjects were then asked to rate the passages’ quality of writing. Results showed that su...