Chapter 8 provides a select introduction to register, genre, and style. The multidimensional analysis of style reveals a gradual drift from “literate” to “oral” over time. Attention is given here to the news and religious registers. The news register has seen the rise of the newspaper, leading to the introduction of new publication types, such as television, radio, and internet news, and new genres, such as editorials, obituaries, or weather forecasts. The religious register has a long history and has been remarkably stable. Two religious genres, prayers and sermons, have changed little in respect to function, structure, and linguistic characteristics. The function of recipes remains constant (i.e., instructions on how to prepare or do something), thus accounting for the imperative as the defining linguistic form, but we find differences in the content of recipes (medicinal vs. culinary), in the audience of recipes (e.g., the professional vs. the amateur cook), in the structural elements found in recipes (e.g., separation of the ingredients and the procedural steps), and in characteristic linguistic features (e.g., the introduction of null objects and telegraphic style).

This conclusion summarises the findings of the previous chapters and takes a global view on the relationships among early modern drama, religious dissimulation, and toleration. Rather than linking the theatre as an institution to one particular religio-political position on the issue of religious dissimulation, this conclusion emphasises the flexibility of the medium and the genuine religious diversity that it could express even on the commercial stage. In contrast to earlier research on toleration in early modern drama, however, this conclusion further argues that the theatre’s complicity in ideologies of persecution was in many cases more pronounced than has been previously recognised, for example by questioning whether comedy and its inclusive impetus imply per se a tolerant stance. Nonetheless, the stage could arguably also exploit the theatrical potential of religious dissimulation for the purpose of entertainment, as is evident, for instance, in the hypocrisy of the stage Puritan, and thereby trivialise the spectre of the secret dissenter and defuse religious tensions to some extent.

The introduction outlines the polyphonic and interactive character of Pliny the Younger’s Epistles by first looking at how Pliny constructs time and space of literary interaction in his social environment. The chapter then moves on with a discussion of interdiscursivity and generic interaction in Pliny’s letters and a review of scholarship on intertextuality. A case study of the triptych of letters 4.26-28 demonstrates how various forms of textual and non-textual interaction are combined in Pliny’s Epistles. Whereas the centrepiece of this series, Ep. 4.27 on the recitation of Sentius Augurinus’ poetry, focuses on oral exchange and mnemonic skills, the preceding letter (4.26) foregrounds the materiality of literature by playing with the motif of books as companions (comites) on journeys. The third letter (Ep. 4.28), on the other hand, emphasizes the visibility of famous writers whose portraits were placed and looked at in libraries. In addition to staging various forms of literary interaction, the triptych of Ep. 4.26-28 also showcases the letters’ intermediality. The introduction concludes with a key to the volume’s chapters.

This chapter explores the impact of ‘subgenre qualifiers’ that modify a genre title and distinguish between, say, ‘melodic death metal’ and ‘progressive death metal’. Endemic within contemporary metal discourse, these qualifiers function both to describe and prescribe the specific focus of a given subgenre, affecting composition, production, performance and reception (among other areas). Focusing on technical death metal, the chapter investigates the prescriptive nature of creativity contained within a relatively precise definition of ‘technical’ developed through consistent usage by artists, reliable acknowledgement from audiences and continual reinforcement by critics. By examining discourse from critics and artists, we can observe how subgenre qualifiers are used creatively, sometimes cast as a conceptual constraint against which an artist struggles, sometimes interpreted as a challenge and an explicit focus for an artist’s musical endeavours. The chapter considers how artists and listeners navigate technical death metal’s delimited forms of expression as a case study of the ostensibly highly stratified nature of modern metal.

Metalcore is a slippery concept. A relatively new genre category, dating from the early 2000s, it provokes wide disagreement about what counts as metalcore and arguments within metal scenes about its legitimacy. This chapter provides an overview of metalcore as an ‘abject genre’, a useful shorthand term for nu metal, screamo, and a variety of core subgenres that have been widely criticised by metal fans. Beginning with commonalities that metalcore shares with other abject genres – some mass popularity, stylistic alterations of traditional metal traits that detractors view as simplified dilutions, quotidian rather than supernatural lyrics, and associations with marginalized categories of identity – I then outline diverse historical accounts by other authors to argue for a more complex view of chronological and conceptual boundaries than an individual narrative might allow. Finally, an analysis of Currents’ ‘Silence’ (2017) provides an example of metalcore as an amalgamation of stylistic qualities from multiple sources. I conclude with thoughts on the utility of abject genres as a concept for reception histories and the potential for metalcore’s complexity as a genre to teach broad lessons about genre in popular music.

The gender of metal and the relationships between the music, misogyny and women have long raised eyebrows amongst popular commentators and scholars. Yet many metal fans claim that the genre is at heart an inclusive, even equal one, ready to welcome all fans regardless of gender, race and sexuality. This chapter gives an overview of thinking about the gendered meanings of metal, its origins in the music of Black blues women, the constraints on women’s music-making, the 1980s moral panic around metal and sexual violence, the gendering and queering of genre, women’s empowerment in metal and metal as a vehicle for feminist fury. I argue that placing women’s metal stories at the centre of our focus reveals different aspects of metal and its culture, and opportunities for understanding metal’s relationship with gender. Claims to inclusivity are exaggerated because metal exists in a sexist world and is not immune to societal discourses. The myth of equality is problematic because it impedes progression towards better inclusion. And yet metal provides opportunities for joy, power and for challenging misogyny for women, opportunities which are beginning to be grasped.

This chapter explores the relationship between writing and knowledge. It shows how writing came to play such an important role in knowledge practices and looks more closely at the idea and definition of academic or scholarly writing. It also considers everyday non-academic knowledge practices. The chapter looks at genre theory and ideas from ‘new rhetoric’ to explore the relationship between writing and knowledge. In some domains the material form of the text is seen as an authority in its own right, and with this in mind, the chapter concludes with an examination of sacred texts.

Over the past twenty years, as W.G. Sebald’s influence and prestige has grown, the Sebaldian has grown beyond a descriptor for traits evocative of Sebald’s works to a bona fide genre, with dozens of representatives in several continents, including Carlos Fonseca, Daša Drndić, and Maria Setapnova. Aspects of the Sebaldian include embedded photography, spurious photographs, and incorporation of archival matter.

Considering genres from a meta-perspective, this chapter elaborates on the mechanisms of comics genres, their specific codes, and their differences and similarities with genres in other media. It shows how genres are a practical tool for categorizing fiction and even more useful in highlighting the economic and cultural underpinnings of publishing contexts and media. As already suggested in Chapter 2, comics genres are particularly useful for understanding the relationships between comics and other media since they help delineate the parameters of the medium-specificity, or mediageny, of comics.

The chapter turns to the hybrid genre of the superhero and uses Fantastic Four as an example to examine the way genres evolve and are redefined by their users over time. It also elaborates on the long history of comics producing meaning for their readers by openly performing genres in addition to adhering to them. In showing how genre has become a less defining entity in contemporary comics production since it is often replaced by transmedial franchises or trademark styles and stories attached to successful authors and artists, the chapter also delineates the limits of generic analysis. For this, it turns to Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics and the Mignolaverse in general.

The third chapter of the book analyzes Pynchon’s portrayal of the complex geopolitical situation around 1900. Against the Day is the longest and most relentlessly globetrotting novel in the global trilogy, and the chapter traces the different literary mapping strategies that Pynchon employs to depict the progress of modernity across the planet and his characters’ restless traverses through this and other worlds. The chapter also analyzes Pynchon’s deft use of various genres from the depicted period, just as it discusses the novel’s curious non-depiction of World War I and Pynchon’s rendering of the defeatist attitude which made the war possible. Finally, through an analysis of the related themes of bilocation and refraction the chapter shows which modes of resistance Pynchon’s longest novel proposes to place against the day, and it undertakes a close reading of the novel’s highly ambiguous epilogue, which leads directly into Gravity’s Rainbow.

What is ‘early Latin’? The main contention of the present volume is that this question does not have a single answer. Rather, ‘early Latin’ is one of those ubiquitous labels (like ‘old’ or ‘archaic’ Latin) which have been used by classical scholars to denote different linguistic entities, and above all to describe a variety of linguistic features, in an often confusing and potentially contentious way. ‘Early Latin’ is above all a linguistic construct, which evokes frameworks of periodisation (often diverging), and posits a distinction between a supposedly discrete and cohesive linguistic variety (‘classical Latin’) and another one, equally discrete and cohesive, belonging to an earlier time period (‘pre-classical Latin’, a notion which has often carried negative value judgments since antiquity). Far from aiming to replace one theoretical framework with another, the studies presented here contribute, through a fresh analysis of specific linguistic phenomena and stylistic trends, to challenge the myths of periodisation and standardisation, and to expose the limited usefulness of evolutionary models to explain language change.

Dividing the Latin language into neat chronological periods will not work without severe reservations. Usages that may seem to be ‘early’ often turn out not to be confined to a particular period, or alternatively their attestations may be genre-related, that is characteristic of a genre that happens to survive mainly from an early period. As for ancient grammarians and commentators on the language, no single concept of what early Latin is may be extracted from their works. Early Latin, or the Latin of ueteres, was a different thing for different commentators. One could use ‘early Latin’ (arbitrarily) of the Latin of the period before about 100 BC, provided that one excludes from the category ‘early’ usages which, though they were current early, also remained current beyond that time. Latin is attested over many centuries, and it was definitely not static. There was not however an entity ‘early Latin’ in use until a convenient date, which then changed into ‘classical Latin’. Recovery of early phenomena requires careful analysis of the distribution, comparative evidence across periods and genres, and a distinction between usage and fashion.

This essay focuses on the two most influential English authors of the later medieval period, Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporary, John Gower, to analyse the roles of women within their corpus, both as subjects and as extra-textual readers. Bridges asks what femininity enables in their works and how ߝ and what ߝwomen mean, emphasising the embeddedness of both writers in long-established and international textual cultures. Central to her analysis is the notion of a hermeneutic that constructs women and femininity in ethical terms, as bound up with notions of vice and virtue. The essay explores questions of voice, agency, and genre across Chaucerߣs works to demonstrate the intimate connection of femininity with questions of reading and interpretation. For Gower too, ethics are shown to be a central focus, and treatments of femininity open onto moral and political debates. Differing presentations of women treated in common by Chaucer and Gower illuminate their ideological priorities and contrasting practices of poetic translatio studii. For both, womenߣs presence proves a complex, powerful, but often ambiguous textual phenomenon.

Called by P. B. Shelley ‘the master-theme of the epoch’, the French Revolution profoundly affected British literature, giving new energy to the nascent Romantic movement while dissolving the boundary between literature and politics. This chapter examines the polarisation of British public opinion in the aftermath of the Revolution and the contestation of its ideas in the 1790s ‘pamphlet war’. The chapter analyses eye-witness accounts of the Revolution by British expatriates such as H. M. Williams and the dilemmas faced by British radicals when war was declared and the Revolution took an increasingly violent course. Wordsworth’s autobiographical account of these conflicts in The Prelude (1805) is set against later imaginative reconstructions of the Revolution by Shelley, Carlyle and Dickens and the more indirect expression of revolutionary shock in Gothic fiction. The chapter concludes by noting the linguistic legacy of the Revolution experience, which created much of the political vocabulary by which we still discuss ideas of nationhood.

The version of 2 Henry VI most people know, read, and study is the play printed in 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. There is, however, an early alternative version of the play, about one third shorter in length, that was printed in quarto format in 1594, entitled The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, and reprinted in 1600 and 1619. The provenance of this shorter text, and its relationship to the Folio text, has provoked much debate. First focusing on the variant versions of a speech about lineage in early quartos and Folio, while drawing in consideration of practices of coauthorship and revision, the chapter then turns to how the death of Gloucester is represented in the various versions. The chapter considers how the different textual versions of this English history play convey also a different emotional register that affects both character and situation.

Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel, Loaded (1995), was hailed as a profound example of the short-lived ‘grunge’ genre in Australia in the late twentieth century, but his work since that point is not typically viewed in that context, nor is that genre generally considered to have continued or evolved since the 1990s. This chapter returns to Tsiolkas’s grunge roots and demonstrates the continuation and evolution of the grunge genre across Tsiolkas’s oeuvre as well as its influence on the work of other contemporary Australian writers. Through comparative discussions of several practitioners of grunge, this chapter examines Tsiolkas’s influence on and development of a critical genre in Australian literary history, arguing that the evolution of Tsiolkas’s grunge and his influence on other grunge writers depends on a simultaneous absorption in and disruption of the myths and identities of the nation in its contemporary literature.