Reflections upon Genre

The presents book departs from an observation made by a group of scholars at Aarhus University: On the one hand, the concept of genre is present in and pivotal for a number of different disciplines studying texts such as literary studies, analytical text linguistics and the investigation of text production in professional settings. On the other hand, and interestingly, each of these disciplines tends to have developed its own theoretical tools and basic assumptions, without taking into account the results and insights achieved in the neighbouring fields. The present work is intended to overcome this state of affairs. It is based upon a series of seminars involving scholars from the mentioned fields. Questions that emerged from the interdisciplinary discussions of the group and that are treated across the different contributions include the following: What is the relation between genre, text production and situation? To what extent is the situation or the function the overarching factor in characterising and distinguishing genres? How do genres develop and acquire new textual characteristics? How does the specificity of the represented genres surface in text and context? The result is an inquiry into problems with relevance across disciplines, where contributions from each field intend to also reflect aspects traditionally treated in the other fields.