Product Description: Including studies of leading science fiction and cyberpunk texts, Damier Broderick considers the characteristic writing, marketing and reception of sci-fi which distinguish it as a genre.
Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from dragnet to The Simpsons, this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television-from policy decisions to production techniques to audience practices. Ultimately, the book argues that through analyzing how television genre operates as a cultural practice, we can better comprehend how television actively shapes our social world.
The texts analyzed underline the wide dissemination of the Arthurian story in medieval and post-medieval Europe, from Scotland to Italy, while the various analyses of the manifestations of comedy refute the notion of romance as a humourless genre. Indeed, the comic treatment of conventional themes and motifs appears to be not only characteristic of later romance but an essential element of the genre from its beginnings and from its earliest development.
In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from social, linguistic, professional, and historical perspectives and explores genre's educational uses, making this volume the most comprehensive view of genre theory today.
Beginning by defining genre as a typified rhetorical action occurring at the nexus of situation, culture, and other genres, Devitt argues that genre highlights variations in texts necessary for creativity, a treatment that opposes the traditional view of genre as constraining and homogenizing. In step with contemporary genre scholarship, Writing Genres does not limit itself just to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions. Devitt succeeds in providing a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, as well as ideological and constraining. This theoretical approach sees genres as types of rhetorical actions that people perform and encounter everyday in academic, professional, and social interactions. As such, jokes, sweepstakes letters, junk mail, mystery novels, academic research papers, small talk, lectures, and travel brochures are all complex genres of their own. Genres such as these have the power to ease communication or to dec! eive, to enable someone to speak or to discourage someone from saying something different.
When viewers think of film noir, they often picture actors like
Humphrey Bogart playing characters like Sam Spade in The Maltese
Falcon, the film based on the book by Dashiell Hammett. Yet film noir
is a genre much richer. The authors first examine the debate
surrounding the parameters of the genre and the many different ways it
is defined. They discuss the Noir City, its setting and backdrop, and
also the cultural (WWII) and institutional (the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee, and the Production Code Administration)
influences on the subgenres. An analysis of the low budget and series
film noirs provides information on those cult classics.
With over 200
entries on films, directors, and actors , the Encyclopedia of Film Noir
is the most complete resource for film fans, students, and scholars.
