Genre in literature and society leads the reader into a modern understanding of genres. Genres are everywhere in human culture. They help determine how we express ourselves, how we understand each other, how we understand the world around us and how we form communities. But genres are mischievous. While we learn to use them, we also learn to overlook them and to accept them as natural, even though they are not that. Among other reasons, genres and their effects on ourselves and on society can be difficult to map and even more difficult to understand.
This book offers a way through the confusion. Its first part consists of a number of genre-theoretic texts that have not previously been translated into Danish. They are followed in the second part by a series of analytical articles, where the theoretical points are brought into play in relation to concrete texts and genres. Together, they provide an overview of and a decisive contribution to the latest genre research and they show how an understanding of genre can generate insights in other areas.
