Genre and Convention - Monika, Harry, Michael and Conor

What are Genres and Conventions?

The Oxford dictionary defines genre as ‘a style or category of art, music, or literature.’ Genre is an umbrella term for everything included in a style/category. It is important to note the distinction between form and genre. A form is a shape or format, such as prose or poetry, genre is the content within this, like a thriller or historical fiction. Texts can be categorised through literary style: Prose vs. Poetry, Theme, Era/Historical Movement, for example, The Romantics.  

When we think of a literary genre we enjoy, we can often identify the characteristics shared between them; they are the distinguishing features isolating them from other genres. These characteristics are called conventions, the practices employed by genres, and they can be recognised in various elements, for example, setting or stock characters. Genre comes after these established conventions, and it's through their repetition that a genre is born.

Genre conventions shift over time. For instance, what we may recognise as a genre now, may one day fall into its own sub-genre. Consider The Hunger Games, Maze Runner and Insurgent series, all young adult dystopian novels that may be categorised into a subgenre one day because they share the same conventions: a young adult in a dystopian setting, usually involving a love interest.

Points to keep in mind about Genre and Conventions and how to use them effectively as a writer.

• Genre conventions provide an author with a framework to build upon, this is practical if they want to write for a specific genre. However, it also impinges creativity and confines the text into a genre-specific boundary, what genre theorist Richard Coe recognise as ‘The Tryanny of Genre’ (Coe, Richard in Freedman and Medway, 1994). If a writer is aware of this, they can utilise the established conventions of their chosen genre whilst acknowledging the need for distinctness. The creation of new genres can only progress through breakthroughs.

• Prejudice toward speculative fiction by the literary community is no secret. For example, in 2013 The Guardian listed their top 10 favourite literary sex changes and overlooked The Wasp Factory by Ian M. Banks. Banks predominantly wrote science-fiction, and although The Wasp Factory does not belong to his genre, as evident in the article comment section, many believe Banks’ snub is due to his reputation as a science-fiction author. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/20/sam-mills-top-10-fictional-sex-changes

• An awareness of genre conventions means a writer can pull conventions from other genres, effectively merging them and therefore appealing to more than one reader base. Consider Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, part War, part Science-Fiction, because of this it appeals to those two reader groups. However, as the distance between one genre grows, due to the inclusion of conventions borrowed from other genres, the less identifiable it is to the reader. Literary Historian Hans Robert Jauss calls this the Horizon of Change. As part of Jauss’s Reception Theory, Jauss believed genres provide readers with expectations built by previous experiences, texts which expanded upon known experiences can affect the reader in a negative or a positive way, those that don’t, aren’t considered ground breaking or seminal. (Jauss and Benzinger, 1970)

• Recognising the conventions and expectations of a genre can allow an author to break the rules and employ a twist, using people’s assumptions to their advantage. Any example of this would be a flat out spoiler so imagine this: You write a story following a cowboy fighting his way across the American Frontier, all the conventions of a western are there, from the setting and the characters. Suddenly, someone dressed in contemporary clothing walks up to the cowboy and tells him he’s ran out of credit and to continue playing ‘the game’ he’ll have to purchase more. Now you have a genre-bending story, one that breaks the reader’s immersion by playing with their expectations, and one that also closely resembles the plot of Westworld.

Further reading

• The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre FIction by Joyce G. Sarricks

• Genre In The New Rhetoric (Critical Perspectives on Literacy & Education)

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Bibliography

Freedman, A. and Medway, P. (eds.). (1994) Genre and the new rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis.

Jauss, H.R. and Benzinger, E. (1970) ‘Literary history as a challenge to literary theory’ In: New Literary History 2  p.7.