Though the concept of genre has been a subject of discussion for millennia, the relatively recent emergence of genre fiction has added a new layer to this ongoing conversation. While more traditional perspectives on genre have emphasized form, contemporary scholarship has invoked both formal and institutional characteristics in its taxonomy of genre, genre fiction, and literary fiction. This project uses computational methods to explore the soundness of genre as a formal designation as opposed to an institutional one. Pulling from Andrew Piper’s CONLIT dataset of Contemporary Literature, we assemble a corpus of literary and genre fiction, with the latter category containing romance, mystery, and science fiction novels. We use Welch’s ANOVA to compare the distribution of narrative features according to author gender within each genre and within genre versus literary fiction. Then, we use logistic regression to model the effect that each feature has on literary classification and to measure how author gender moderates these effects. Finally, we analyze stylistic and semantic vector representations of our genre categories to understand the importance of form and content in literary classification. This project finds statistically significant formal markers of each literary category and illustrates how female authorship narrows and blurs the target for achieving literary status.
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Romance novels cover more distance than mystery or science fiction, meaning that their ending states are the most removed from their starting states. This intuitively makes sense given that romance novels end with a happy couple (which is not how they often begin). Romance novels also have the fastest pace of all the genres and cover the most topics in each book section. Interestingly, fewer actual events occur in romance novels than in mystery or science fiction. One potential explanation for this is how protagonist-centered romance novels are: they feature the protagonist most out of any genre, they feature fewer side characters than other genres, and they are more likely to be written in first-person. It seems possible that romance novels prioritize revealing protagonist interiority over describing external events. This proximity to the protagonist likely aides in the “reader’s vicarious emotional participation" in the romantic relationship, which is central to romance. Furthermore, romance novels are by far the easiest genres to read, as indicated by their Tuldava scores, average word lengths, and average sentence lengths. Some have asserted that romance is not a respected because of its association with women, and while many scholars have made strong arguments for this, its syntactic simplicity might also be a contributing factor. (11-12)
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One of the most noteworthy observations about gendered practices within genre fiction begins with our corpus: Out of the 208 romance novels in the CONLIT dataset, only 2 were written by men. Though female authors have long been the primary producers of romance fiction, this staggering of a difference far exceeds author gender ratios suggested by other researchers. The difference could be attributed to the fact that the romance novels in the CONLIT dataset were drawn from a list of bestselling romance novels on Amazon, in which female authors might be more highly represented than in the romance genre more broadly.
While romance novels are distinct from science fiction and mystery novels in terms of their form, content, and author gender, science fiction and mystery texts are quite similar across female and male authors. (12)
Here's the abstract:
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