16A computational stylistic genre analysis of Spanish-American novels builds on terms and concepts from several disciplines. These must be clarified and related to each other, which is the goal of this chapter, in which genre-theoretical aspects, concepts of literary style and literary-historical basics on the Spanish-American novel are discussed. In the first part of this chapter (2.1), concepts of literary genre are approached. First, it is outlined which scholarly disciplines are concerned with genre studies, which ones are relevant for digital genre stylistics, and how they relate (2.1.1). Then three literary theoretical issues about genre, which have caused much debate in literary genre theory, are discussed, namely their ontological status and relevance (2.1.2), the relationship between systems or theories of genres and their history (2.1.3), and three main types of concepts for genres as categories – logical classes, prototype categories, and family resemblance analysis (2.1.4). All of these theoretical issues are related to digital stylistic genre analyses' practices to find out which genre theoretical concepts are useful and applicable in that field and how literary genre theory and computational genre stylistics interact. In the second main part of this chapter (2.2), a working definition of literary style is presented as a basis for analyzing metadata and text in the empirical part of the thesis. In the last part, in section 2.3, literary-historical background information is given for three major thematic subgenres and three literary currents of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels to formulate hypotheses and establish a basis on which they can be analyzed textually.
17In general language, the term “genre” is used to designate kinds of communicative acts that may be written, spoken, or otherwise represented. Not individual instances of communicative acts are designated by the term “genre”, but the characteristics of groups of them. Genres may be of any sort of communication, for example, instruction manuals or podcasts, but in most cases, “genre” refers to forms of art such as kinds of works in the visual arts, performing arts, music, and literature, the latter being at the center of interest here, more precisely in their written form. This investigation thus focuses on literary genres.12 In a general sense, literary genres can be understood as groups of literary texts that share or can be referred to with a group name because they have something in common. For example, Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express”, Henning Mankell’s “Innan frosten”, or Mario Vargas Llosa’s “Lituma en los Andes” can all be considered novels and, more specifically, crime novels. There has been much debate in literary studies about what the genre names are or should be, what the commonality of the texts belonging to a genre is, and what role genres play for literary texts at all. The investigation of literary genres is an old but still a central problem of literary studies, whether on a theoretical or historical level. The discussion about genres can at least be dated back to antiquity, and often, Aristotle‘s Poetics from c. 335 BCE is cited as one of the initial texts concerned with genre theory.13 Still today, there is an ongoing debate on the definition of genres both in the sense of general concepts as well as on the level of concrete individual genres, which the vast literature on genre theory and the history of genres shows.14
18However, literary genres have not only been investigated in literary studies themselves but also within the broader context of textual genres and text classes, for example, in general linguistics, computational linguistics, and information science. While in literary studies, genres are usually understood as kinds of literary works, in linguistics, they tend to be conceived as all sorts of texts, also non-literary ones, and are therefore often referred to as ”text types“.15 In the field of computational processing of text, there is a tradition, especially in computational linguistics, of describing, detecting, and distinguishing genres and types of text.16 In computer science, the task of automatically grouping different kinds of texts has been pursued under the labels of “text categorization“ or “text classification“.17 The term “categorization” is used in different ways in computer science. Sometimes it is understood as equivalent to “classification”, and in other cases, it is only used for unsupervised methods such as clustering.18 Here, in contrast, the term “categorization” is used in a more general sense to comprise all different kinds of category building. This is the sense of the term that is usually used in literary genre theory (see Müller 2010Müller, Ralph. 2010. “Kategorisieren.” In Handbuch Gattungstheorie, edited by Rüdiger Zymner, 21–23. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler.).
19The concern with literary genres, the linguistic characteristics of text types, and the computational processing of text converges in digital literary studies, computational philology, or computational literary studies and more specifically in digital stylistics, or ”stylometry“. The scope of digital literary studies is broad and comprises all points of contact between literature and the computer.19 The term ”computational philology“ can also be understood as a collective term for all possible uses of the computer in literary studies, with a focus on the creation and use of digital editions, for example, but also on computational text analysis (Jannidis 2007Jannidis, Fotis. 2007. “Computerphilologie.” In Handbuch Literaturwissenschaft. Gegenstände – Konzepte – Institutionen, edited by Thomas Anz, vol. 2, Methoden und Theorien, 27–40. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler.; 2010, 109Jannidis, Fotis. 2010. “Methoden der computergestützten Textanalyse.” In Methoden der literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Textanalyse, edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, 109–132. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler.). Computational literary studies, on the other hand, is a newer term for a subfield of the digital humanities in which a particular emphasis is placed on quantitative text analysis methods20. Digital stylistics, in turn, focuses on studying style with digital methods. Stylistics can be defined as “a sub-discipline of linguistics that is concerned with the systematic analysis of style in language and how this can vary according to such factors as, for example, genre, context, historical period and author” (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010, 12Jeffries, Lesley, and Daniel McIntyre. 2010. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). The paradigmatic case of a digital stylistic study is authorship attribution, i. e. the use of statistical methods to clarify cases of anonymous or disputed authorship. However, quantitative digital methods have also recently been used for genre stylistics.21 It should be added that stylistics also is a sub-discipline of literary studies when its methods are applied and developed in the context of literary scholarship, especially because style is considered an important characteristic of literary texts (Spillner 2001Spillner, Bernd. 2001. “Stilistik.” In Grundzüge der Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Heinrich Detering, 234–256. 4th ed. München: dtv., 234).
20The present study, which aims to create and analyze a corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels and their subgenres, is situated in the field of quantitative digital literary studies, computational literary studies, or, more precisely, digital genre stylistics. Therefore, the theoretical discussions of genre in general literary studies are only one point of reference. Still, they constitute a central theoretical frame for analyzing literary genres in digital stylistics, and it has to be clarified which aspects of genre can be and usually are analyzed with the text analytical digital approach.
21Three issues that have been at the center of genre theoretical discussions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are taken up here and related to questions of the design and analysis of digital corpora of literary texts in terms of genre: the question about the ontological status (are they just abstract terms or do they exist?) and the relevance of genres, the debate about the relationship between systematic descriptions and definitions of genres and their historical manifestations, and the question of the type of category that genres can be conceived as.22 These issues are considered especially relevant for literary texts and genres. They are interrelated because they all center around the question of the individuality of texts and the variability of the characteristics of text groups. The following chapters serve to address these essential literary genre theoretical issues and relate them to digital genre stylistics.
22The first of the controversial issues of twentieth-century literary genre theory that is taken up here is the question of whether genres actually exist. Another question related to it is whether genres are a relevant category for literary analysis at all because if they would not exist, why should they be investigated? Both in the early and late twentieth century, there were theoretical approaches that fundamentally questioned the relevance of genres. According to nominalistic positions, generic terms are just abstract labels to aggregate and subsume similar texts, but genres do not exist. On the other hand, representatives of realistic positions argue that genres exist independently of individual texts, for example, as psychological dispositions or anthropologically basic world views (Zipfel 2010, 213–214Zipfel, Frank. 2010. “Gattungstheorie im 20. Jahrhundert.” In Handbuch Gattungstheorie, edited by Rüdiger Zymner, 213–216. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.). In his book “Gattungstheorie. Information und Synthese”, which was published in 1973, Hempfer discusses both kinds of positions in detail by surveying a broad range of approaches that can be subsumed under the labels “nominalistic” versus “realistic”. An important early critic of considering art in terms of genre was Croce, who emphasized the uniqueness and individuality of works of art as a result of the aesthetic and creative impetus of human activity. He considers genres useless and views them as intermediate pseudo-concepts between the individual and the universal, unable to capture or describe the individual expressions (Hempfer 1973, 38–41Hempfer, Klaus W. 1973. Gattungstheorie. Information und Synthese. München: Fink.). Genre categories were also questioned later, in particular in post-structuralist theories. For example, Derrida finds that literary texts essentially break rules, while genres start from the opposite idea of a set of normative rules for text production and reception.23 Still, he indirectly also recognizes the relevance of genre for the production and reception of literary works by stating that texts participate in genres even if they cannot be neatly assigned to them:
Before going about putting a certain example to the test, I shall attempt to formulate, in a manner as elliptical, economical, and formal as possible, what I shall call the law of the law of genre. It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. (Derrida 1980, 59Derrida, Jacques. 1980. “The Law of Genre.” Translated by Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 55–81.)
23According to Derrida, texts usually mark their relationship to genres, and for literature, he even sees this characteristic as necessary.24 This remark can be made consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, it can be made relative to several different genres, and it can be made in ways undermining the referenced genre, “mendacious, false, inadequate, or ironic” (Derrida 1980, 64Derrida, Jacques. 1980. “The Law of Genre.” Translated by Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 55–81.). Frow interprets Derrida’s critique of genre as rooted in a very specific concept of it – one that relates genre to prescription and taxonomic endeavors (Frow 2015, 28Frow, John. 2015. Genre. The New Critical Idiom. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.) – but that is not without alternatives:
The conception of genre that I have been working towards here represents a shift away from an ‘Aristotelian’ model of taxonomy in which a relationship of hierarchical belonging between a class and its members predominates, to a more reflexive model in which texts are thought to use or to perform the genres by which they are shaped. (Frow 2015, 26–27Frow, John. 2015. Genre. The New Critical Idiom. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.)
24Another direction of the post-structuralist critique of genre is the one developing the concept of écriture, which was initially formulated by Barthes. He defines écriture as a level between language and style, on which authors can express themselves individually and consciously, engaging in the history of literature and pursuing social intentions. Language, in turn, is naturally given to the writers of a certain period and linguistic context, and it works as a prescriptive and habitual frame. Style, on the other hand, is an individual characteristic of each writer and is just as little controlled as the general language use (Barthes [1953] 2002, 16–18Barthes, Roland. (1953) 2002. Le Degré zero de l’écriture. Reprint, Paris: Seuil.). Compared to genre, the concept of écriture focuses more on the singularity of texts, their individual interrelationships, and the writing process. From this viewpoint, genres are seen as mere terms that suggest clear differentiations where in fact, the texts interrelate more freely and openly. In this sense, the idea of écriture is linked to recent theories of intertextuality. Nevertheless, as in Derrida’s law of genre, the genres remain a point of reference when texts allude to generic terms and conventions, be it to break them (Schmitz-Emans 2010, 107–109Schmitz-Emans, Monika. 2010. “Écriture und Gattung.” In Handbuch Gattungstheorie, edited by Rüdiger Zymner, 107–109. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.).
25On the realistic side, there are, amongst others, normative and anthropological conceptions of genre, but also communicative and semiotic approaches, including conceptualist positions.25 In general, communicative theories assume that genres exist as concepts that influence the production and reception of literary works. In a narrower sense, communicative genre theories are linguistically oriented. In a wider sense, theories that emphasize the social functions of genres can also be subsumed under this term. An influential proposition was Voßkamp’s idea to describe genres as “literary-social institutions” that undergo stabilization and dissolution processes and in which socio-historical communicative needs are condensed in a particular time and place. As such, genres are communicative models that are not mere text-internal literary phenomena but determined by a broader societal context (Voßkamp 1977, 30, 32Voßkamp, Wilhelm. 1977. “Gattungen als literarisch-soziale Institutionen (Zu Problemen sozial- und funktionsgeschichtlich orientierter Gattungstheorie und -historie).” In Textsortenlehre – Gattungsgeschichte, edited by Walter Hinck, 27–44. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.; Zipfel 2010, 215Zipfel, Frank. 2010. “Gattungstheorie im 20. Jahrhundert.” In Handbuch Gattungstheorie, edited by Rüdiger Zymner, 213–216. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.). In semiotically oriented communicative genre theories, texts, genres, and generic terms are all conceived as complex linguistic signs, and genres can be understood as conventionalized models of an intended message or reality (Raible 1980, 324–326Raible, Wolfgang. 1980. “Was sind Gattungen? Eine Antwort aus semiotischer und textlinguistischer Sicht.” Poetica 12: 320–349.). It is assumed that such conventions and models influence authors producing literary texts and that readers, in their turn, use them to categorize and make sense of individual literary works. That way, genres become part of the communicative process and manifest themselves in it without being equated with a particular part of the process. Statements on and expectations about genres are controlled and triggered through generic signals that can accompany literary texts, be inscribed into them, and interpreted from them.
26According to Hempfer, genres are only truly communicatively and semiotically determined if they are understood as a precondition for the comprehension of literary texts that authors are forced to take into account and not only as historically possible but not necessary options of communication (Hempfer 1973, 90–92Hempfer, Klaus W. 1973. Gattungstheorie. Information und Synthese. München: Fink.). It follows from this that, communicatively speaking, literary works cannot be without genre. It does not mean, though, that every work needs to be associated with exactly one genre on one specific level. On the contrary, texts can be influenced by several genres and also on different levels of generality. The mentioned “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Lituma en los Andes” can be interpreted as instances of crime novels and, at the same time, novels and, more generally, narrative. However, “Murder on the Orient Express” can also be analyzed more specifically as a “detective novel” and “Lituma en los Andes” has also been assessed as a “novela indigenista” (Martínez Cantón 2008Martínez Cantón, Clara Isabel. 2008. “El indigenismo en la obra de Vargas Llosa.” Espéculo. Revista de estudios literarios 38. https://web.archive.org/web/20210226164843/https://webs.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero38/vllindig.html.). Then again, other texts are only framed by the genre “novel” but not a specific subtype of it. They are sometimes called “general fiction” or “literary fiction”, if the literary merit of the works is stressed.26 As Raible puts it: “Ein Werk als Exemplar einer Gattung sehen heißt es in eine Reihe von Werken stellen, die analog zu einem Präzedenzfall sind” (Raible 1980, 334Raible, Wolfgang. 1980. “Was sind Gattungen? Eine Antwort aus semiotischer und textlinguistischer Sicht.” Poetica 12: 320–349.). One work alone does not constitute a genre, but when it is produced and received according to communicative models that have formed and have been formed by other works, it becomes part of a system of generic conventions.
27If texts that participate in genres – to speak in Derrida’s terms – are understood as communicative objects, they should be described both on the level of the communicative situation and on the level of the textual sign itself. This means that both text-external features, for example, the time and place of its publication, and text-internal features, such as certain elements of content or style, determine how a text participates in a genre. Text-external factors can considerably determine a text's form, and they can narrow down the possibilities of a text's interpretation. However, literary works, especially written ones, are functionally less determined than other types of texts (Raible 1980, 334Raible, Wolfgang. 1980. “Was sind Gattungen? Eine Antwort aus semiotischer und textlinguistischer Sicht.” Poetica 12: 320–349.).
28An approach reconciling aspects of the nominalistic and realistic conceptions of genre presented so far is Hempfer’s position, which he calls “the constructivist synthesis”. Following Piaget’s theory of knowledge, on the level of scholarly description, he sees genres as structures that emerge from the interaction between the subject that seeks to understand them and the objects to which the structure is applied. These structures constitute a process of approximation between subject and object. As Hempfer formulates it:
Auf der Ebene der historischen Entwicklung lassen sich die ‘Gattungen’ nun nicht im gleichen Sinn wie etwa die Geburt Napoleons als ‘Faktum’ begreifen, sondern es handelt sich, wie in den verschiedensten semiotisch orientierten Gattungstheorien betont wird, um Normen der Kommunikation, die mehr oder weniger interiorisiert sein können. Da diese Normen aber an konkreten Texten ablesbar sind, werden sie für den Analysator zu ‘Fakten’ und lassen sich demzufolge allgemein als faits normatifs verstehen, ein Begriff, den Piaget aus der Soziologie zur Bezeichnung analoger Phänomene in die Psychologie eingeführt hat. Diesen faits normatifs wird dann in der wissenschaftlichen Analyse eine bestimmte Beschreibung zugeordnet, die als solche immer ein aus der Interaktion von Erkenntnissubjekt und zu erkennendem Objekt erwachsenes Konstrukt darstellt. (Hempfer 1973, 125Hempfer, Klaus W. 1973. Gattungstheorie. Information und Synthese. München: Fink.)
29The more interiorized the communicative norms are, the more they approach the status of ahistorical constants (for example, knowledge about what narrative is). Hempfer aims to differentiate the ahistorical constants from historical norms that are less interiorized and more subject to open (for example, poetological) discussion and change (Hempfer 1973, 126–127Hempfer, Klaus W. 1973. Gattungstheorie. Information und Synthese. München: Fink.).27
30This paper follows Hempfer’s idea that genres are not to be understood as objective facts, but as communicative phenomena that can, however, leave traces in texts. If genres are understood as norms, then such textual traces can be conceived as normative facts in Hempfer’s sense. The connection between genres as communicative norms and the texts on which they have an influence results in turn from the communicatively established assignment of texts to genres. How is it made clear that a text participates in a genre? This can be expressed, for example, through generic signals in the texts but also through signals that accompany the texts (e.g., in subtitles or paratexts). Thus, genre signals and genre names used in connection with literary works have a special significance for establishing genre affiliations. The various references and levels of meaning of such linguistic expressions of genres are broken down, in particular, in semiotic genre theories. Since genre labels are digital genre stylistics’ primary approach to communicative genre norms, semiotic genre models are discussed in more detail in the following chapter.
31One aspect that semiotic models of genres focus on is the multilayered meanings of generic terms, which point to the many communicative levels that genres can be defined on and the complexity of genres as signs. As signs, the generic terms can be understood as models for the even more complex models that the genres themselves are conceived as (Raible 1980, 334Raible, Wolfgang. 1980. “Was sind Gattungen? Eine Antwort aus semiotischer und textlinguistischer Sicht.” Poetica 12: 320–349.). Two semiotic models for generic terms are presented in more detail here. These are used as a basis for an empirically established discursive model of subgenre terms for the corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels created and analyzed in the context of this dissertation.28 The first of the two models has been formulated by Raible (1980, 342–345Raible, Wolfgang. 1980. “Was sind Gattungen? Eine Antwort aus semiotischer und textlinguistischer Sicht.” Poetica 12: 320–349.) and involves six dimensions from which generic terms usually draw their meaning and classificatory features:
Commençons par une question banale: quel est le statut des classes générique? Ou, pour éviter de nous encombrer dès le début d’entités peut-être fantomatiques, demandons-nous plutôt: quel est le statut des noms de genres? [...] l’identité d’un genre est fondamentalement celle d’un terme général identique appliqué à un certain nombre de textes. [...] les noms générique traditionnels sont la seule réalité tangible à partir de laquelle nouns en venons à postuler l’existence des classes génériques [...]. (Schaeffer 1983, 65–67Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.)
32The names of the genres are significant because they witness that a generic class of texts has a communicative existence, condensed in a name. Furthermore, names applied to texts signal that the texts participate in the genres, and the participating texts, in turn, contribute to the genre’s identity. The above quote is intentionally reduced to concentrate on the aspect of relevance of the generic names. In the wider context, Schaeffer explains that the relationship between the generic names and the texts is not at all simple. The names can have different statuses, as analytical ex-post terms, as words in use in a very specific historical situation, or as something between both of these poles. They can be applied collectively to a set of texts at once or to individual texts so that multiple applications of the terms, or their sum, form the genre. The meaning of generic names is not fixed, not synchronically, and especially not over time, and they can be related to other terms. One text can be associated with several generic names, which may involve different levels of significance (Schaeffer 1983, 65–66, 69Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). Schaeffer emphasizes that he does not want to replace a theory of genre with a lexicological study of generic names but wants to start from them to account for the fluent character of the genres and to understand the kind of phenomena that are covered by the generic names (Schaeffer 1983, 75–76Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). For Schaeffer, a generic term is any term, “á condition qu’il soit utilisé pour classer des œuvre ou des activités verbales linguistiquement et socialement marquées et encadrées (framed), et qui se détachent par là de l’activité langagière courante” (Schaeffer 1983, 77Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). He thus does not start from a strict separation of generic terms for literary and non-literary works, although his study focuses on the former. A condition for a term to be generic is that it is used for classifying works or other linguistically and socially marked and situated verbal activities. This definition again focuses on the communicative function of genres. It is limited to oral and written linguistic acts because it presupposes verbal activities, which excludes, for example, communicative acts in the visual or performing arts or music. However, within the literary-linguistic frame set by Schaeffer, all kinds of generic terms are considered.
33A central observation that Schaeffer makes is that generic names do not all refer to one specific dimension of a literary work. Possible dimensions are, for example, the syntactical and semantic chain of a text that expresses a work. Instead, generic terms pick up all kinds of levels of a work as a global discursive act. That way, the generic identity of a literary work is not unique and fixed but depends on the perspective or perspectives taken towards it (Schaeffer 1983, 79–80Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). Similar to Raible, Schaeffer defines a literary work as a complex semiotic object. He describes dimensions of this object to which generic terms usually refer. Schaeffer’s model comprises five principal dimensions:
34The approaches that view literary genres as complex semiotic objects are characterized by differentiation and openness. An advantage is that they enhance the comparability of different genres by clarifying on which discursive levels generic terms operate without restricting the functioning of genres to a specific communicative level. On the other hand, some genre theoretical aspects are not clarified by these models because they focus on the communicative nature of generic structures. For instance, the semiotic models do not include the generic terms’ provenience and their theoretical or historical nature into the core model, nor do they make statements about the kind of categories that genres can be (if they are to be understood as classes of texts, as prototypical structures, or other types of categoric relationships between literary works). Therefore, these two genre theoretical aspects are discussed further in the subchapters 2.1.3 (“System and History”) and 2.1.4 (“Categorization”).
35The focus of the semiotic models on generic names leaves out another aspect of genres: who says that there are no communicative patterns without a name? There may be genres that have not been explicitly discussed or labeled but nonetheless exist as frames for communicative acts. A sign of this is that there are genres that have primarily been labeled by literary scholars in retrospect but that were not explicitly named in their historical peak phase. This does not necessarily mean that the scholars made arbitrary classifications without considering contemporary communicative practices. For example, both the novela gauchesca and the novela indigenista could not be found as explicit generic labels in the bibliography and corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels that were prepared for this dissertation.29 They are, nonetheless, established subgenres of the novel in the corresponding literary historiography (see, for instance, Ghiano 1957Ghiano, Juan Carlos. 1957. “La novela gauchesca.” La Biblioteca, Época 2, 9 (1): 17–38. and Meléndez 1961Meléndez, Concha. 1961. La novela indianista en Hispanoamerica (1832–1889). Rio Piedras: Universidad de Puerto Rico.). Furthermore, generic signals, i.e., text-external or -internal aspects of literary works that indicate in which genres they participate, are not limited to explicit mentions of generic names. They can also be implicit or established through intertextual references (Fowler 1982, 88–105Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). However, such indirect signals are not directly congruent with a sign-based linguistically oriented approach and thus need to be taken into account in addition.
36Up to this point, the ontological status of genres has been discussed, with a particular focus on semiotic theories of genres. In the following chapter, the general, genre-theoretical considerations will be directly related to the approaches of digital genre stylistics. Which possibilities of knowledge about genres arise from digital analyses, if they are carried out starting from certain genre-theoretical foundations? Which methodological aspects of computational genre analyses play a role in this context? Which genre theoretical approaches have been used in digital genre stylistics so far? In the following, these questions will be discussed, focusing on the special role of digital text corpora, genre labels, textual features, and text style in digital genre stylistics.
37Regarding the question of the ontological status of genres, Hempfer’s synthesis can be productively related to approaches pursued in digital genre stylistics. In digital stylistics, the anchoring point between genres as communicative norms and their descriptions in terms of textual features is just the style of the texts. Whenever literary works are associated with specific genres, a basic assumption for a digital stylistic genre analysis is the following: that the text style can be analyzed to assess to what degree there are normative facts expressing the generic participations of the works in the genres and of what these facts consist. Obviously, the analysis of text style is limited to the syntactic realization of the discursive act, but this does not mean that digital stylistic concepts of genre are reduced to this level of communication. The level on which digital genre stylistics principally operates is the linguistic, strictly speaking, even the orthographic surface of certain manifestations of literary texts as they are transmitted in a form that is determined by the digital medium. Still, many kinds of discursive aspects can be analyzed on this level. The crucial point is how the participation of the texts in genres is modeled and defined. As several literary genre theorists have pointed out, texts can be classified arbitrarily by any criterion, and this would include any computationally tractable aspect of text style.30 Such an endeavor is not the point in itself. The question is to which communicative norms of genre the texts relate and in what way. A good example of taking the relativity and significance of generic assignments into account is a study conducted by Underwood, in which he analyzes different definitions of Gothic novels at different points in time.31 As Underwood states:
Distant reading may seem to lend itself, inevitably, to literary scholar’s fixation on genre as an attribute of textual artifacts. But the real value of quantitative methods could be that they allow scholars to coordinate textual and social approaches to genre. This essay will draw one tentative connection of that kind. It approaches genre initially as a question about the history of reception — gathering lists of titles that were grouped by particular readers or institutions at particular historical moments. But it also looks beyond those titles to the texts themselves. Contemporary practices of statistical modeling allow us to put different groups of texts into dialogue with each other. (Underwood 2016, 2Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.)
38The debate that Underwood engages in is the question of the life cycle of genres. Some critics sustain that genres have relatively short life cycles, roughly corresponding to one generation and about 25 years. Others say that genres can sustain an identity over periods much longer than that, even if there are shifts in the concept of the genre. “Textual analysis won’t prove either claim wrong, but it may help us understand how they’re compatible” (Underwood 2016, 2Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.). With this assertion, Underwood outlines an important task of digital genre stylistics: not necessarily to refute or confirm claims that are made on other levels of genre investigation (as here in the history of reception), but to look for textual and more specifically stylistic evidence as traces of these other levels. That way, genres are not established in style, but through style. Underwood aims to investigate how textually coherent the Gothic is over time:
Evidence of this kind [that only a one-generational linguistic coherence could be found] wouldn’t rule out the possibility of longer-term continuity: we don’t know, after all, that books need to resemble each other textually in order to belong to the same genre. But if we did find that textual coherence was strongest over short timespans, we might conclude at least that generation-sized genres have a particular kind of coherence absent from longer-lived ones. (Underwood 2016, 3Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.)
39So digital genre stylistics can help to find out which genres imply stylistic coherence of the texts attributed to them at all and on which levels of text style they do. Underwood finds out neither strong evidence for the succession of genre generations nor for a gradual consolidation of the genres over time. The sensation novel is short-termed but textually not very coherent, while detective novels and science fiction novels are textually connected for longer periods (Underwood 2016, 4Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.).32
40If digital stylistic genre analysis functions as a connector between social and communicative norms of genre and stylistic textual evidence, several aspects in the connective chain need to be defined and selected with care. Usually, a corpus of texts is analyzed, and the generic conventions in question are expressed as genre labels of the texts, which themselves are representatives of literary works. The assignment of genre labels to the texts is the first crucial point. Which kind of genre labels are selected, and how are they assigned to the texts? The semiotic models of generic terms provide a way to differentiate between different discursive levels on which genres can be defined, which can help not to compare “apples with oranges”. That would happen if one would, for example, contrast primarily formally defined genres with thematically defined ones. The sources of the genre labels should always be indicated to document which kind of generic convention they represent. Do the genre attributions go back to assignments made to individual texts by different authors, editors, or publishers? Or are they collectively defined, for example, established in a discussion of a set of works by a contemporary critic or poet, by modern institutions, or by a literary historian? Are the assignments made based on explicit generic terms or implicit signals of the texts? Or are they derived from specific theoretical definitions of genres that are applied to the texts? Depending on the answers, quite different kinds of generic conventions can be analyzed. In the worst case, it is not clear which type of genre an analysis aims at, and the goal of addressing a communicative pattern that lies outside of the analysis itself would be missed. Awareness of the kind of analysis target can still be raised in digital genre stylistics.33 Despite all good advice and intentions to analyze genres or subgenres only on a defined discursive level or on the basis of homogeneous sources of subgenre labels, especially large-scale digital analysis using hundreds or even thousands of texts have to face challenges in defining which generic conventions they refer to. Even in qualitatively oriented genre analysis, selecting works for a corpus that aims to cover one or several specific genres is not trivial. A starting point using either certain labels or definitions of the genre(s) has to be found.34 Beyond that, some strategies of text selection and genre assignment are not viable for very large corpora. It is, for example, not possible to read every text and check it against a genre definition that relies on qualitative textual features, i.e., characteristics of the texts that are not (yet) easily formalized and computationally analyzable. Furthermore, it is very likely that large corpora also cover lesser-known texts which critics have not considered yet. That way, existing critical approaches may only cover part of a text corpus. On the other hand, depending on the kind of genre, explicit labels on historical editions may also not be the norm. These are additional difficulties that quantitative genre analysis faces in defining of its object of investigation through the selection and preparation of the text collection. Such challenges make it even more important to clarify which genre convention is addressed and how this is done.
41Besides assigning genre labels to the texts, another fundamental point for a digital genre analysis is the selection of textual features. In the end, the normative facts that can be found in the texts, that can be related to genre conventions, and that can be used to establish definitions of genres, depend on which kind of textual material is analyzed. There are different opinions regarding the importance of which kind of features are selected. Underwood, for example, highlights the predictive power of statistical models, which is based on specific features but not directly dependent on them:
Leo Breiman has emphasized that predictive models depart from familiar statistical methods (and I would add, from traditional critical procedures) by bracketing the quest to identify underlying factors that really cause and explain the phenomenon being studied. Where genre is concerned, this means that our goal is no longer to define a genre, but to find a model that can reproduce the judgements made by particular historical observers. (Underwood 2016, 5–6Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.)
42Taking the example of science fiction, Underwood explains that a very reliable textual clue for this genre are adjectives of size such as “huge” or “tiny” and that a set of some more hundred words would be enough for a statistical model to recognize instances of the genre. Still, he argues, these genre markers do not need to correspond to any definition of the genre that has been formulated so far, and they might not lead to any definition that could be articulated verbally in a useful way (Underwood 2016, 6Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.). Underwood’s stance towards selecting textual features is characterized by a reproductive strategy on the one hand and an explorative one on the other. It is a reproductive strategy in the sense that text analysis is used to replicate social constructions of genre to find out about their general relationship to the textual basis. It is explorative in that the kind of features used is not defined in a top-down approach and controlled in advance, but tested as for their reproductive relevance: “To put it more pointedly: computational methods make contemporary genre theory useful. We can dispense with fixed definitions, and base the study of genre only on the shifting practices of particular historical actors – but still produce models of genre substantive enough to compare and contrast. Since no causal power is ascribed to variables in a predictive model, the choice of features is not all-important” (6Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.). Following this approach, the normative facts found as traces of social constructs of genres would not lead to descriptions of them in scholarly terms, at least not to definitions focusing on the kinds of facts found.
43A different view on the question and relevance of feature selection is formulated by Jannidis, who outlines a set of general methodical working steps for computational text analyses: “1. Thesenbildung, 2. Bestimmung der Indikatoren, 3. Korpuszusammenstellung, 4. Korpusvorbereitung, 5. Suche, 6. Quantitative Erhebung, 7. Überprüfung von Indikatoren und Korpuszusammenstellung sowie Diskussion der These im Licht der Ergebnisse” (Jannidis 2010, 110Jannidis, Fotis. 2010. “Methoden der computergestützten Textanalyse.” In Methoden der literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Textanalyse, edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, 109–132. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler.). In this setup, the choice of indicators is directly linked to the formulation of an initial thesis and is more driven by prior theoretical assumptions than in Underwood’s approach.35 It represents a deductive procedure. In the case of genre analysis, a genre-related thesis would need to be formulated, for instance: “In social novels, there are more different characters than in sentimental novels”. To be able to verify or falsify the hypothesis through computational text analysis, it would be necessary to define textual indicators representing the concepts mentioned in the hypothesis. The above example would require an approach to identify characters in the text, for example, by detecting mentions of character names and other linguistic references to characters and resolving to which character they point. It would be necessary to automatically detect the set of different characters in a novel, which is a difficult task. Somewhat easier to formalize and closer to a stylistic analysis would be a hypothesis such as “In social novels, there are more mentions of different character names than in sentimental novels”. Like the explorative procedures, also top-down approaches have several advantages and disadvantages. What is good about them is that they start directly from the scholarly field that is also the target context. If the goal is to find out something about literary genres and the hypothesis is formulated in literary scholarly terms, the hypothesis is compatible with the epistemological frame of the investigation. In addition, the selection of textual indicators and features can be motivated theoretically so that meaningful and interpretable results can be expected. The main disadvantage is that the possibility of formalizing the hypotheses depends on the available technical methods. Although research is done in this direction, many literary theoretical concepts still need to be formalizable.36 Existing text mining methods, for example, topic modeling or sentiment analysis, may also be used to operationalize the hypotheses. Then it must be explained in what way they can be considered formalizations of literary theoretical concepts, such as themes, topoi, or emotions. In any case, in such an approach, the selection of specific textual features is not at all arbitrary or negligible. The features represent the texts and are assumed to cover stylistic aspects that are traces of generic conventions in the texts. The chosen indicators must be suited to check the plausibility of the literary theoretical hypothesis. At the same time, the choice of the indicators themselves is based on assumptions: “Das Verhältnis zwischen Indikatoren und These ist allerdings in vielen Fällen keineswegs selbstverständlich, sondern hat selbst hypothetischen Charakter” (Jannidis 2010, 116Jannidis, Fotis. 2010. “Methoden der computergestützten Textanalyse.” In Methoden der literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Textanalyse, edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, 109–132. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler.). Even in hypothesis-driven digital genre analysis, the suitability of the features needs to be tested empirically to some degree.
44In the same way as the kind of generic convention that is analyzed and the selection of corresponding genre labels, the choice of textual features for a digital stylistic genre analysis should also be motivated. How specific the chosen features are and how important it is to clarify their relationship to literary theoretical concepts depends on the kind of strategy that is chosen for the genre analysis: it can be primarily deductive, inductive, or experimental, and it can be theoretically or historically oriented. In principle, digital genre analysis can be used for all kinds of investigations. The goal can be, for instance, to find out if and in what way works with specific historical or critical genre labels are textually coherent, as Underwood did. Another goal can be to test if a specific scholarly definition of a genre holds when it is formalized and applied to a corpus of texts that have been assigned to the genre in question. The results of a stylistic genre analysis could also be used to formulate new, statistically-based definitions of genres. Even if textual variables in statistical models do not necessarily reflect causal relationships, their distribution can be interpreted to reach empirically based genre definitions if genres can be distinguished based on these variables. A sentence in such a definition could be, for example, “the genre X is defined such that the probability of a love topic is significantly higher in texts that participate in the genre X than in texts that do not participate in this genre”. In Hempfer’s terms, the normative fact that was found is the different probability of a certain kind of topic in two groups of texts that are associated with different genres by convention. The genre is constructed in the interaction of the scholar who decides which textual features to use and which texts to analyze on the one side and the texts themselves on the other. Moreover, the scholar has to interpret the topics and decide that one of them can be described with the term “love”. Furthermore, it has to be decided what “significantly higher” means. A definitory phrase such as the one above can itself be used as a hypothesis that can be tested in other empirical settings, for example, with a different corpus of texts. To what extent the found textual characteristics of exemplars of different genres actually correspond to conscious social norms can only be clarified by analyzing contemporary or historical discussions about what the genres in question are. That would not be different in non-computational text analysis. In addition, besides starting from known generic conventions or scholarly definitions of genre, a digital stylistic genre analysis can also start from the texts themselves. For instance, a corpus of texts can be built for a certain period and a specific cultural, geographical, and linguistic context. It can then be analyzed which groups of texts emerge as textually coherent when specific textual features are used. Such an approach would allow for the possibility of detecting faits normatifs as signs of communicative patterns that might not have had a high degree of explicitness. They might not have been frequently named or broadly discussed in the historical context, and possibly they have not been described yet in scholarly terms. In such cases, it would as well be possible to complement the quantitative analysis with a qualitative study of intertextual links, of implicit or explicit signals in the texts and paratexts, and of metatextual statements that could substantiate or question the communicative relevance of new findings of text groups.
45When stylistic text features are interpreted as signs of generic conventions, a difficult point is how clearly the relationship between both characteristics of texts can be established: having certain features or a specific distribution of them on the one hand and participating in a particular generic convention on the other. In this context, only the causal relationship between the genre label and the textual features is meant, not the question of the kind of social, generic norms and their unconscious or conscious application. In many cases, literary-historical studies of genres focus only on one, positively described genre.37 Often subtypes of one genre are distinguished as part of the investigation, especially if a major genre is concerned,38 but explicitly contrastive studies are rare.39 In corpus-based and empirical digital genre stylistic analysis, it is more usual to directly contrast different genres or subgenres to find distinctive features for each group (see, for instance, Schöch 2018Schöch, Christof. 2018. “Zeta für die kontrastive Analyse literarischer Texte. Theorie, Implementierung, Fallstudie.” In Quantitative Ansätze in den Literatur- und Geisteswissenschaften, edited by Toni Bernhart, Marcus Willand, Sandra Richter, and Andrea Albrecht, 77–94. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110523300-004. and Schöch et al. 2018).40 Approaches based on statistical classification also bring forth features that are decisive for distinguishing different classes of texts.41 If only the characteristics of one genre are worked out, one cannot say with certainty that there are not other genres that share part of these characteristics. This possibility is avoided in contrastive studies. On the other hand, the results of comparative approaches obviously depend on what is compared. A contrastive text analysis aiming to define the sentimental novel, which is based on a corpus of sentimental, historical, and adventure novels, will lead to a definition of the sentimental novel that is relative to the other subgenres. If sentimental novels were instead compared to science fiction and crime novels, different aspects might be decisive in their distinction and recognition. The choice of the corpus that is used to determine a genre in the context of other genres is, therefore, a central aspect of digital stylistic genre analysis. In the case of contrastive analysis, the relationship between the textual features and the genre in question is established relative to other genres on which the outcomes depend.
46Another challenge in this regard is that text style is not only a function of genre. All kinds of intra- and extra-textual phenomena shape the style of a text. A special awareness of this circumstance has developed in the field of authorship attribution, where it was repeatedly noted that, for example, the period a text was written and published in but also its genre interfere with authorship signal.42 In the same way, authorship, time period, and other factors can also obscure the link of textual features to genre.43 It may thus happen that conclusions are drawn about genre that are instead due to unrecognized effects of other variables. Considering the different discursive levels on which generic terms and genres can be defined, it is also likely that these different levels may correlate or interfere with each other. For example, in the bibliography of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels that was prepared for this dissertation, there are 172 novels with the primary thematic subgenre “novela sentimental”. For 85 of these, the literary current to which they belong is unknown. 72 have been associated with the romantic current, 15 with the realist, eight with the naturalistic, and two with the modernist current.44 Putting aside the cases of unknown literary currents, the numbers suggest a strong correlation between a primarily sentimental theme and the romantic current. Definitions of the sentimental novel derived from this set of novels will therefore be strongly influenced by the period in which the romantic current was the dominant aesthetic program.
47If there are undesired factors that influence the target style that is analyzed (e.g., the influence of period on genre style if genre is the primary concern), then several strategies are possible to cope with such factors. A crucial aspect is the construction of the text corpus that is used for the genre analysis. For example, it is possible to include only one text or an equal number of texts per author. This prevents the results from being too much influenced by authors that were very productive writers of texts that can be attributed to specific genres. However, in most cases, creating a balanced corpus means moving away from a text collection that represents the historical proportions of works according to specific criteria. It means that one tries to create a synthetic setting that can be used to get results that are free from unwanted influencing factors in order to reach a definition of the subject that is theoretically “clean”. This may be very difficult if there are not enough sources for such a corpus. Going back to the Spanish-American sentimental novels, taking an equal number of romantic and realistic sentimental novels would reduce the number of novels to analyze to 30 instead of 172. Besides controlling external factors through corpus building, another possibility is to try to choose the text features in such a way that they are likely to be relevant for specific generic distinctions but not for other kinds of differences. However, it has so far not been possible to isolate features that are only connected to a single extra- or intratextual influencing factor.45 A third way would be to model the factors that are assumed to influence the target variable, for example, by collecting corresponding metadata and using this information when the analysis results are inspected. In principle, a corpus that is created by random sampling may represent historical imbalances. However, it would still be possible to estimate how much influence other factors have on the stylistic features that are interpreted in terms of the genres that are investigated. The decision for a specific strategy to control different factors that may influence the text style may depend on the aim of the study. The wider the claim of validity is for the results that are reached, i.e., the more independent they should be from contextual determinations and intra-textual correlates, the more important it is to build a corpus and features that are theoretically adequate. The narrower the scope of the genre study, the more it will be acceptable to have a corpus and feature set that is influenced by the specific historical setting, and that leads to a less theoretical but more organic description of the genres in question. Looked at another way, the stronger the theoretical claim on the results of a corpus-based study, the more important it is to control for possible factors influencing the target variable of the study, i.e., literary genres. On the other hand, a primary interest in historical adequacy can be pursued by considering and investigating influencing factors, but not necessarily controlling them, for example, by balancing a corpus of texts. Awareness of influencing factors is still indispensable in both cases to make sure that the assertions made are about genre at all.
48It is clear that the ontological status of genres as conventions or norms of communication or social interaction – if they are understood in that way – makes the access that digital genre stylistics has to them one that is mediated by text style. Text style, in turn, is influenced by a number of factors other than genre. These influence factors are never captured as a whole but only on selected levels of textual features that are chosen for analysis. One could say that genre “hangs by a thread” for digital stylistics, but in general, in the debate about the status of genres, the field can be characterized as inclined towards the realistic side. How strong the connection between genres, genre labels, and genre signals, on the one hand, and common features of text groups, on the other hand, is, can be analyzed in detail with digital text analysis. It is to be expected that the results may be quite different depending on the kinds of genres and the literary-historical contexts that are investigated. Quantitative approaches lend themselves very well to analyzing big corpora of formula fiction, that is, popular genre fiction for which uniform patterns of style are expected. In such a research setting, genres are probably more tangible than in an analysis of highly canonized, individualistic works of art where generic references may be weaker.46 Furthermore, as was pointed out above, digital genre stylistics is a field that is closely linked to computational linguistics, and the existence of linguistic text types is less questioned than the one of literary genres, mainly because it is more evident that the text types constitute communicative norms.
49There are further aspects that are as well relevant to the relationship between literary genre theory and digital genre stylistics and that have not been covered yet in this discussion of the role of corpora, genre labels, features, and text style. One aspect is the relationship between genre systems and their history, a field of tension that is also linked to terminological questions. Another aspect is the debate about the type of categories that genres can be conceived as. These issues will be touched upon in the next chapters.
50Besides the ontological status of genres and the question of how genres are to be grasped communicatively and textually, another central point of debate in the theoretical discussions of genre in the twentieth century was about the relationship between a system of genres and their history (Zipfel 2010, 214Zipfel, Frank. 2010. “Gattungstheorie im 20. Jahrhundert.” In Handbuch Gattungstheorie, edited by Rüdiger Zymner, 213–216. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.). In this and the following chapters, major positions on this question are outlined and it is discussed how they relate to approaches of digital genre stylistics. The question involves several issues, among which are:
51There is a range of different propositions for defining the relationship between systematic and historical genre concepts. An early proposal was formulated by Todorov, who argued for the necessity to distinguish between theoretical genres that arise from deductive procedures and are based on a theory of literature and historical genres that are captured by observing the historical, literary reality. Todorov sees historical genres as a sub-ensemble of theoretical genres. That the definition of theoretical genres depends on a theory of literature is explained by Todorov as follows: a theory of literature involves a concept of how a literary work is represented. A theory of genres then refers to the theoretical concept of the literary work to determine on which levels of this concept genres are defined and which generic characteristics are available on each level. According to Todorov, three aspects must be distinguished for a representation of a work: the verbal, the syntactic, and the semantic aspect. The first one corresponds to concrete phrases of a text that represents a literary work and is connected to questions of register,47 style, and the instance enunciating or receiving the text. The second level concerns the composition of a literary work, that is, the organization of its different parts (logically, temporally, or spatially). For the third level, the semantic one, the themes or topics of the literary work are relevant (Todorov 1970, 24–25Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil.). Possible theoretical genres are deducted from the constellations of characteristics that are available on the different levels that the literary work is defined on. The historical genres are a sub-ensemble of them because not all of the theoretically possible genres may be found in the history of literature. Although Todorov proposes a clear distinction between theoretical and historical genres, he also sees how they are interrelated:
Les genres que nous déduisons à partir de la théorie doivent être vérifiés sur les textes: si nos déductions ne correspondent à aucune œuvre, nous suivons une fausse piste. D’autre part, les genres que nous rencontrons dans l’histoire littéraire doivent être soumis à l’explication d’une théorie cohérente ; sinon, nous restons prisonniers de préjugés transmis de siècle en siècle [...]. La définition des genres sera donc un va-et-vient continuel entre la description des faits et la théorie en son abstraction. (Todorov 1970, 25–26Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil.)
52Todorov notes that the genres (and it can be assumed that he means theoretical as well as historical genres) do not exist in the literary works, but rather that they are manifested in them. According to Todorov, if a theory tries to explain it, the relationship of manifestation between genres and works is characterized by probability and cannot be seen as absolute (Todorov 1970, 26Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil.). An important point can be derived from Todorov’s explanations: even historical descriptions of genres depend on theoretical presuppositions, or rather, different genre theories vary in the extent to which they integrate historical observations into their definitions of generic systems and genres. The debate about a system versus a history of genres can then be viewed as one of degree (from the extreme that history is not needed to establish a theory of genres to the other that a theory of genres is only possible in the description of historical circumstances) and terminology (are different kinds of genres, abstract-theoretical and historical ones, to be distinguished and which notion should be called a “genre”?).
53As was outlined in the previous chapter, the different genre theories that can be ascribed to the realistic side concentrate on different locations of the being of genres. The ones that see it as primarily determined by production would also need to focus on the productive side to describe genres historically, for instance, on the history of the creation and publication of the literary works that participate in the genres. In the same way, if genres are primarily conceptualized as a phenomenon of reception, the history of the reception of literary works that are seen as instances of the genres becomes a central element of the theory. Such a genre theory is, for example, sketched by the romance philologist Jauß. Croce’s rejection of genres as relevant concepts because every work of art is individual and violates genres is taken up by Jauß, who objects that a literary work can only be understood as breaking the rules of genres if there is a previous understanding of these rules: “it still presupposes preliminary information and a trajectory of expectations (Erwartungsrichtung) against which to register the originality and novelty” (Jauß 2014, 131Jauß, Hans Robert. 2014. “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 127–147. New York: Routledge.). The horizon of what can be expected is conceived as the contemporaneous reader’s knowledge of tradition and experience with other literary works. Because such a horizon of expectation is always present, there is no work without a genre. Because the horizon may be shifted with the experience that a reader makes with new works, genres have a “processlike appearance and ‘legitimate transitoriness’” (Jauß 2014, 131Jauß, Hans Robert. 2014. “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 127–147. New York: Routledge.). Jauß concludes that “literary genres are to be understood not as genera (classes) in the logical senses, but rather as groups or historical families. As such, they cannot be deduced or defined, but only historically determined, delimited, and described” (Jauß 2014, 131Jauß, Hans Robert. 2014. “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 127–147. New York: Routledge.). Because the readers’ horizon of expectation cannot be determined from a purely theoretical standpoint, Jauß’ genre theory is essentially historical. However, it is still a theory, especially when the approach is used to trace the history of one or several genres in broader lines:
the history of genres in this perspective also presupposes reflection on that which can become visible only to the retrospective observer: the beginning character of the beginnings and the definite character of an end; the norm-founding or norm-breaking role of particular examples; and finally, the historical as well as the aesthetic significance of masterworks, which itself may change with the history of their effects and later interpretations, and thereby may also differently illuminate the coherence of the history of their genre that is to be narrated. (Jauß 2014, 132Jauß, Hans Robert. 2014. “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 127–147. New York: Routledge.)
54Here, Jauß also recognizes that a specific literary work’s role in the history of a genre is not only determined by the contemporaneous context of reception but also depends on how broadly the temporal context is chosen and which perspective the scholar has on it. This view can as well be related to Hempfer’s constructivist synthesis: In this case, the normative facts are the expressions of horizons of expectations about genres, which must be substantiated through historical sources,48 and the genres are constructed in the interaction of the person with these facts.49
55Many more theoretical approaches to genres are concerned with determining trans-temporal basic genres. One example is Goethe’s attempt to define the epic, the lyric, and the drama as the three genuine natural forms (Genette 2014, 212Genette, Gérard. 2014. “The Architext.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 210–218. New York: Routledge.). Problems with the definitions of these three natural forms are pointed out by Genette, who introduces a more differentiated terminological system. It aims to clarify which aspects of the three basic forms can be considered trans-historical and which ones are historically bound. For Genette, the lyrical, epical, and the dramatic can be defined as “modes”, understood as linguistic categories that describe the mode of enunciation, for example, narration in the case of the epical and dramatic representation for the dramatic. On the other hand, as soon as thematic elements enter the concepts, Genette argues that they become historically variable. Only in this form, in combining formal and thematic elements and in pointing to specific historical conventions, should they be called “genres” (Genette 2014, 210, 213Genette, Gérard. 2014. “The Architext.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 210–218. New York: Routledge.). Even so, to do justice to the importance of the three major genres, lyric, epic, and drama, and the prominent status that they had in the history of literature, Genette calls them “archigenres”:
Archi-, because each of them is supposed to overarch and include, ranked by degree of importance, a certain number of empirical genres that – whatever their amplitude, longevity, or potential for recurrence – are apparently phenomena of culture and history; but still (or already) -genres, because (as we have seen) their defining criteria always involve a thematic element that eludes purely formal or linguistic description. (Genette 2014, 213Genette, Gérard. 2014. “The Architext.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 210–218. New York: Routledge.)
56Genette also attributes a dual status of higher-order categories and specific historically manifested genres to less prominent forms such as the novel or the comedy, which can be subdivided further into “species”, a concept which is comparable to subgenres, “with no limit set a priori to this series of inclusions” (Genette 2014, 213Genette, Gérard. 2014. “The Architext.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 210–218. New York: Routledge.). Although Genette separates a level of the trans-historical, linguistically defined modes, by admitting a dual status for genres, he maintains a double function of generic terms as theoretical and historical entities, and is inclined towards the theoretical status:
There is no generic level that can be decreed more ‘theoretical’, or that can be attained by a more ‘deductive’ method, than the others: all species and all subgenres, genres, or supergenres are empirical classes, established by observation of the historical facts or, if need be, by extrapolation from those facts – that is, by a deductive activity superimposed on an initial activity that is always inductive and analytical (Genette 2014, 214Genette, Gérard. 2014. “The Architext.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 210–218. New York: Routledge.)
57If no generic level can be decreed more theoretical than others, they are all theoretical, although empirically induced. Compared to the production- or reception-aesthetic and the social- and function-historical-oriented approaches on the one side and the essentially literary-theoretical positions on the other, the semiotic models of genres and generic terms as elaborated, for example, by Raible and Schaeffer can be located on a middle position regarding their systematic and historical conception of genres. They are based on a theory of language and on models of the discursive levels that are involved in speech acts, which forms their theoretical core. History enters into this system because the meaning of signs is context-dependent and changes over time. In addition, the speech act is embedded into a situational context. Because there are a speaker and a hearer, or an author and a reader, not only the linguistic but also the extra-linguistic context becomes relevant, although this aspect is not the primary concern of the semiotic approaches.
58In its applied form, digital genre stylistics deals with corpora of contemporary or historical texts and has, therefore, a strong empirical foundation. Historical realizations of literary works are at the center of digital text analysis. Para-textual and extra-textual factors are often included in an analysis as metadata. For example, genre labels of different proveniences are included, as well as biographic information about the works’ authors, information about how the works have been received and valued by contemporaries or literary critics, or details about the sources of the texts and their publishing (when were the works published, where and by whom?). However, a broader or closer consideration of the literary and extra-literary-historical context is usually not pursued as part of the quantitative digital genre analysis itself. One example is Underwood, who places his analysis of detective, science fiction, and Gothic novels in the context of the history of reception. He uses basic bibliographic metadata to do so, but not entire historical documents, which could serve to reconstruct how the works in question and the genres they are associated with were received in their time (Underwood 2016, 2, 11, 17, 20–21Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.). The approach is reasonable because supervised learning is used, and if genre assignments are the target categories, they need to be formulated as compact terms. However, the idea of relating the analysis of the texts to how they were received in terms of genre historically is there. In most corpus-based analyses, though, no shifts in the relationship between generic terms and texts are analyzed, but one specific synchronic view. The synchronic view may either be based on scholarly and librarian classifications, on those made by contemporary readers, publishing houses, or booksellers, or on labels found on historical editions of the texts.50 The first group of contemporary labels thus leads to an analysis of how today’s genre concepts relate to the style of historical texts and, depending on the kind of textual material that is analyzed – twentieth-century or seventeenth-century texts, for instance – the contexts of production and reception are quite different. In the latter case of using historical genre labels, a specific historical section of the literary field is analyzed, and the contexts of the texts themselves and their generic categorization are congruent. Even if the historical development of genre concepts is not explicitly modeled from the point of view of reception over time, quantitative genre stylistic analyses are likely to involve different relationships between genre labels and texts, especially if the corpora are very large and comprise texts of one long or of several literary-historical periods. In the end, macroanalytic and, thus also, diachronic studies are enabled by the availability of a huge number of literary texts in digital format.51
59Digital genre stylistics can thus refer to both systematic and historical concepts of genre. An important question is whether one can speak of literary genres in the same sense for the text groups constituted or characterized by digital text analyses as is done in traditional literary genre studies. This thesis argues that literary theory's notions of genre are not directly transferable to digital genre stylistics, and that the field needs its own conceptual set with which to meaningfully describe its questions, methods, and results. Such a conceptual set also has the task of clarifying the relationship to existing concepts from other fields, that is, especially literary studies, linguistics, computational linguistics, and computer science. In the following, existing conceptual systems on textual and communicative, theoretical and historical dimensions of genre are discussed, and a conceptual system of our own for digital genre stylistics is proposed.
60In digital genre stylistics, it has sometimes been proposed that one should not speak about the analysis of “genres” in this case, but of “text types”. This is because of the focus of digital genre stylistics on the literary texts themselves and more specifically on their linguistic surface and style, and the relatively limited inclusion of information that is related to the literary-historical and social context. At the same time, genre is a concept that appears to be strongly influenced also by extra-textual historical factors. On the one hand, the terminological distinction between genres and text types has its origin in linguistics, where literary genres are differentiated from linguistic text types. On the other hand it has also been proposed in literary genre theory itself as a means of distinguishing between genres that are based purely on textual and linguistic criteria and historical genres. This is similar to Genette’s proposal to differentiate between mode and genre. In the context of text linguistics, text types (in German, “Texttypen”) are described as follows:
Texte werden zu Texttypen zusammengefasst auf der Grundlage linguistischer Kriterien. Texttypen verlaufen quer zu den Textsorten in verschiedenen Kommunikationsbereichen. Als linguistische Kriterien gelten dabei textinterne Merkmale (Merkmale der Textinfrastruktur) wie Stil (Stiltyp, z.B. Ironie, Nominalstil), Medialität (medialer Typ, z.B. digitaler Text, konzeptionell mündlicher Text), Textfunktion auf der Basis sprachlicher Indikatoren (Funktionstyp, z.B. Kontakttext), Themenentfaltung/Vertextung (Vertextungstyp, z.B. explikativer Text). (Gansel 2011, 13Gansel, Christina. 2011. Textsortenlinguistik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.)
61Style is directly mentioned as a defining characteristic of text types in the linguistic sense. However, the linguistic term that is used in a way that can be compared to the general conception of literary genres is also “text type” (in German, “Textsorte”):
Wir definieren Textklasse als das Vorkommen einer Menge von Texten in einem abgegrenzten, durch situativ-funktionale und soziale Merkmale – also textexterne Merkmale – definierten kommunikativen Bereich, in dem sich Textsorten ausdifferenzieren. [Z. B. Textklasse] Religion – [Textsorten] Predigt, Ordensregel, Enzyklika oder [Textklasse] Politik – [Textsorten] Koalitionsvertrag, Parteiprogramm, Regierungserklärung. (Gansel 2011, 12–13Gansel, Christina. 2011. Textsortenlinguistik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.)
62In the latter sense, which is predominant in text linguistics since the “pragmatic turn”, the linguistic text types are also primarily determined by text-external factors that characterize the communicative situation, and they are understood as norms and conventions, which influence how texts are produced and received (Gansel 2011, 8–10Gansel, Christina. 2011. Textsortenlinguistik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.; Krieg-Holz and Bülow 2016, 220Krieg-Holz, Ulrike, and Lars Bülow. 2016. Linguististische Stil- und Textanalyse: eine Einführung. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.). These two uses of the term “text type” should thus not be confused. The terminological differentiation between pragmatically determined text types and syntactically and semantically distinguishable ones is also recognized in computational linguistics, where it is labeled as the opposition between genres and text types. It is probably through this influence that the conceptual separation between genres and text types has also been taken up in digital genre stylistics. In his computational study of linguistic genre variation, Biber, for example, declares:
I have used the term ‘genre’ (or ‘register’) for text varieties that are readily recognized and ‘named’ within a culture (e.g., letters, press editorials, sermons, conversation), while I have used the term ‘text type’ for varieties that are defined linguistically (rather than perceptually). Both genres and text types can be characterized by reference to co-occuring linguistic features, but text types are further defined quantitatively such that the texts in a type all share frequent use of the same set of co-occurring linguistic features. Because co-occurrence reflects shared function, the resulting types are coherent in their linguistic form and communicative functions. (Biber 1992, 332Biber, Douglas. 1992. “The multi-dimensional approach to linguistic analyses of genre variation: An overview of methodology and findings.” Computers and the Humanities 26 (5–6): 331–345. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136979.)
63Biber says that also genres are related to the occurrence of specific linguistic features, but in a way that is less consistent than in the case of functionally determined text types. Biber determines the text types in a bottom-up approach by using factor analysis and interpreting the resulting dimensions in terms of linguistically expressed communicative functions. Biber finds five dimensions of variation (informational versus involved, narrative versus non-narrative, elaborated versus situated reference, overt expression versus persuasion, and abstract versus non-abstract style) on which he bases his definitions of text types (Biber 1992, 334–335, 339–340Biber, Douglas. 1992. “The multi-dimensional approach to linguistic analyses of genre variation: An overview of methodology and findings.” Computers and the Humanities 26 (5–6): 331–345. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136979.). In their computational linguistic approach to the detection of text genre, Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze, on the other hand, only use the term “genre”, which they define broadly as encompassing both literary and non-literary texts: “We will use the term ‘genre’ here to refer to any widely recognized class of texts defined by some common communicative purpose or other functional traits, provided the function is connected to some formal cues or commonalities and that the class is extensible” (Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze 1997, 33Kessler, Brett, Geoffrey Numberg, and Hinrich Schütze. 1997. “Automatic detection of text genre.” In ACL '98/EACL '98: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Eighth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 32–38. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics. http://dx.doi.org/10.3115/976909.979622.). Both Biber and Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze recognize that genres are difficult to grasp on the formal linguistic level, but they expect (as Biber) or require (Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze) that some common formal elements can be found for texts that have been associated with the same genre.
64In linguistics and computational linguistics, the discussion of the distinction between genres and text types focuses on the differences between conventional and pragmatic characteristics on the one side and structural linguistic features of text groups on the other side. In literary genre theory, in contrast, the point of debate in this terminological question is more oriented towards the systematic versus historical nature of the objects. Fricke, for instance, argues that it is not necessary to abandon neither the function of generic terms as names for historical groups nor their use as classificatory terms but that they should be distinguished. He differentiates a “literary text type” (“literarische Textsorte”) from a “genre” and defines the first one as a purely systematic term to categorize literary texts and the latter as a term for historically bound and delimited literary institutions. To determine if a text belongs to a text type, its grammatical, semantic, and textual-pragmatic functions must be analyzed (Fricke 1981, 132–133Fricke, Harald. 1981. Norm und Abweichung. Eine Philosophie der Literatur. München: Beck.). According to Fricke, more criteria need to be fulfilled in order to attribute a text to a genre. First, the text needs to conform to a clearly distinguishable literary text type. Second, the literary text type has to be established in the national literature of the text in question when the text is created, so that it corresponds to the expectations that contemporary readers have regarding the characteristics of the literary text type. Third, the text needs to explicitly carry an established name of the literary text type or exhibit other established signals for it. Finally, Fricke also uses the term “Gattung” (German for “genre”) as a general term that can be used to both designate literary text types, genres, or any other establishment of groups of literary texts (Fricke 1981, 132Fricke, Harald. 1981. Norm und Abweichung. Eine Philosophie der Literatur. München: Beck.). Fricke’s proposal to speak of literary text types is fruitful for cases in which literary texts are classified based on syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic linguistic properties or any other textual characteristics without establishing any direct connection to a specific historical genre discourse. This use of the term “text type” is congruent with the definition of “Texttyp” in general linguistics and “text type” as used by Biber. However, Fricke’s definition of “genre” is very strict. According to his concept, genres are a subset of the text types that they correspond to, because a common text type is a prerequisite. In addition, the text type has to correspond to contemporary expectations, which means that only generic conventions that are realized as distinguishable text types actually represent genres. Fricke does not say how he would call generic expectations or norms that are not mappable to specific combinations of textual features in a consistent way. Moreover, distinctions of literary genres made after the text’s creation, whose participation in a genre is analyzed, are not called genres if the genre concept had not been established before. For example, the gaucho novel would not be a genre of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels if it could not be verified that the term or the concept already existed as a norm that was conscious to the historical authors, publishers, readers, and critics. Furthermore, texts that are similar to others because of linguistic criteria but do not carry explicit or established implicit generic signals would also be considered as not participating in a genre. It makes sense not to assume a common genre simply because of textual similarities – one could, for example, find similar verse structures in the poetry of different centuries and continents by accident, for which no historical relationship could be verified. Nevertheless, if a text was created in the same context as a group of other texts that carry an explicit genre name and they all share textual features, one might argue that the non-labeled text also participates in the genre. Determining where the same context begins or ends is another question that needs to be solved. One can also not exclude the possibility of cases of generic references spanning different temporal, geographical, or linguistic contexts, even if this is not the usual case. A wider definition of genre would be more appropriate for the purpose of digital genre stylistics. Such a definition should be able to relate conventional or critically established generic groupings of different kinds with findings of groups on the textual level without restricting the kinds or relationships.
65Examining Fricke’s definition of genre further and following his explanations, even his definition of text types appears too narrow for digital genre stylistics. In requiring the congruence of texts that share the features of a certain text type and that belong to a certain genre convention, Fricke already assumes that the text types are linked to generic expectations. Any arbitrary text classification could not be expected to be congruent with the genre concepts if not by accident. Thus Fricke requires a precise and systematic definition of a text type that can serve as a starting point for an empirical study that aims to verify if the text type was institutionalized as a genre in some historical period (Fricke 1981, 133Fricke, Harald. 1981. Norm und Abweichung. Eine Philosophie der Literatur. München: Beck.). The text types should not be defined arbitrarily but according to their scholarly appropriateness: “Um ihrer heuristischen Eignung willen wird man die Textsortenbegriffe folglich in der Regel so festlegen, daß sie aufgrund hypothetischer literaturgeschichtlicher Vorannahmen voraussichtlich auf historisch belegte Texte zutreffen und daß nach Möglichkeit sogar irgendwann einmal ein dieser Textsorte entsprechendes Genre bestanden hat” (Fricke 1981, 134Fricke, Harald. 1981. Norm und Abweichung. Eine Philosophie der Literatur. München: Beck.). Defining text types beforehand that probably correspond to historical genres requires a deductive procedure starting from assumed prior definitions of these genres. As was already discussed in the previous chapter, digital genre analyses can be conducted in a number of different ways: they can start with the formulation of theoretically based hypotheses about genres, which are then formalized, but they can also start from genre labels that stand for conventional ideas of genres and directly test if and how they relate to textual characteristics, without following a continuous chain of formalizing steps. The hypotheses about the relevance of specific textual features for genres can be quite loose. A strength of the computational approaches is specifically that series of different hypotheses can be tested and also that unforeseen results can be achieved through experimentation. In many cases, the formalization of literary concepts is not so mature that it would allow for continuous deductive procedures. Consequently, text types found through digital stylistic analyses do not necessarily have to be in line with literary-theoretical text types or historical genres. Rather, what can be looked for are the points of intersection between generic conventions and groups established based on textual features. They can be approximated to each other, but it should not be expected that they depend on each other or that there is a relationship of inclusion between them. I propose to widen the understanding of genre, but in turn to differentiate between two kinds of genres to establish a connection to text types. For the purpose of digital genre stylistics, as it is conducted in this dissertation, the following working definitions are proposed:
66In what follows, these determinations are explained and
justified in more detail. With the differentiation between conventional and
textual literary genres, the genres can be both detached from specific
textual features or linked to them. To find out about the textual literary
genres in which literary text types and conventional literary genres overlap
is then a central task of digital genre stylistics. All kinds of
relationships between conventional genres and text types can be assumed. For
example, an extreme case would be a generic norm that has been discussed in
poetological writings and can be described as a conventional literary genre,
but that has never been realized on a textual level through a set of
literary works. At the other extreme would be a text type that is
recognizable in terms of recurrent patterns of feature distributions and
that can be distinguished from other text types based on these features, but
that has never been named or discussed as a conventional genre. Between
these two extreme cases, many other constellations are possible, for
example, groups of texts that carry signals of a particular conventional
genre but of which only a part is coherent on the textual level. Another
possible case is a conventional genre, which is held together by a common
name but which relates to several different text types so that it can be
described as several different textual genres. Such a result could stimulate
further investigation into the conventional genre to see if there are signs
of several subtypes.52 Also possible are cases where
two different conventional genres relate to the same text type. For example,
it could be analyzed if different terms of shorter narrative prose in the
Spanish-American nineteenth-century tradition that do not seem to be limited
very clearly as conventional genres (“narración”, “relato”, “cuento”,
“novelita”) have a common textual basis. Three of the many possible
constellations between text types, conventional genres, and textual genres
are illustrated schematically in figure
1.
67The first case on the left side is one where a conventional genre and a text type overlap to a certain degree so that one textual genre can be identified. The parts of the conventional genre that lie outside the textual genre refer to literary texts that have been marked as being part of the convention but that do not conform to the text type. On the other hand, there are texts whose characteristics correspond to the text type but that have not been assigned to the conventional genre. In the three examples shown in the figure, there is no relationship of inclusion between the conventional genre and the text type, but this would, of course, also be possible. In such a case, all the literary texts that conform to the text type could also be part of the conventional genre, only that some other texts that are associated with the conventional genre are not congruent with the text type (inclusion of the text type in the conventional genre), or all the texts that participate in the conventional genre are in line with the text type, and, in addition, there are texts that fulfill the criteria of the text type but that have not been marked as belonging to the genre by convention (inclusion of the conventional genre in the text type). The second case in the middle of the figure illustrates a relationship of overlap between one conventional genre and two different text types, so that two textual genres are identified. In such a setting, it is conceivable that one genre name is used for different text types that can be distinguished either synchronically or diachronically. The third case to the right shows how two conventional genres, which are, for example, characterized by two different genre names, can be covered by the same text type. Here, too, there result two different textual genres. An example of this constellation would be if the same textual characteristics are found in different historical contexts and different genre names are used in these contexts to refer to them. In the schematic cases shown here, only up to two conventional genres or text types are involved, but there could, of course, also be scenarios where more parts are involved.
68What is the status of generic signals that relate literary works to genres in this setup? Explicit genre names, implicit textual genre signals such as conventionalized titles or names, or beginnings of the texts53 are understood as belonging to the level of conventional genres. The presence of such signals does not necessarily mean that a text conforms to a specific textual genre, and even their absence does not mean that a text cannot be described in terms of the same text type that is connected to a textual genre. An unconventional use of generic signals, for example, a subversive or an ironic one, can be detected when there is a discrepancy between the individual text carrying the signal and other members of a textual genre.
69A question that needs to be addressed is how assignments of literary texts to genres that are not established by paratextual or textual signals but text-externally relate to the three terms defined above. Part of this question is how generic terms and definitions of genres, on the one hand, and the text types, conventional, and textual genres, on the other hand, behave in relation to the literary system, literary theory, and literary history. As Schaeffer notes: “les termes génériques on un status bâtard. Ils ne sont pas de purs terms analytiques qu’on appliquerait de l’extérieur à l’histoire des textes, mais font, à des degrés divers, partie de cette histoire même” (Schaeffer 1983, 65Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). What Schaeffer means is that also terms that are defined externally are part of the history of genres. Very important is his remark that generic terms do so to different degrees. Furthermore, the degree also depends on the perspective. If a nineteenth-century Mexican editor labels several books that are published for the first time as “novelas”, he applies this term collectively to several works. He thus has an understanding of the genre that already involves a systematic element – he compares the books to his concept of the genre novela and decides if they fit into the category or not. However, if we analyze these nineteenth-century novels today, we perceive the editor’s decisions as part of the history of the genre and his opinion as formed by the convention of the time. The labels would therefore be signs of the conventional genre. In addition, the understanding that an editor has of a genre is probably not much formed by theoretical considerations. If, instead, a contemporary writer expresses his views on what the novela is in poetic terms and lists several works that conform to his definition of the genre, this, too, would represent a systematic and possibly also theoretically motivated approach to the genre.54 To his or her contemporaries, the initiative could appear as not being part of the genre convention but rather as an attempt to define a textual genre. For the literary historian, again, it would clearly contribute to the genre convention of the time, even if the historical, poetic definition of the genre is by degree more systematic and theoretical than the practice of individual writers or editors who provide the texts that they write or publish with generic labels. Yet another case is that of a modern librarian who classifies historical texts by genre. If one librarian does this, a unique concept of the genre (the one the librarian has) is applied collectively to a set of texts. If several librarians classify the texts together, multiple genre concepts are involved.55 The labeling that the librarians do is not part of the historical genre convention of the context in which the literary texts were initially created and published. Instead, it is part of the modern genre convention, even if that convention has a systematic background and is informed by literary studies. This is the more obvious the more different people participate in applying a specific concept of genre. Finally, literary-theoretical or literary-historical positions can also be perceived as conventional if they are analyzed collectively. When the genre assignments of twenty different literary scholars are examined together, it is not very probable that they all share the exact same theoretical understanding of the genres in question. The sum of their judgments constitutes itself a theoretically based genre convention. Conventional genres can thus involve a systematic and theoretical element.56 The more weight that systematic and theoretical element has, the more probable it is that the genre convention largely correlates with a text type. On the other side, historical poetical genre definitions as well as modern literary theoretical ones could also be understood as theoretical entities and be used as hypotheses about textual genres. They could then be tested by applying them to the texts that have been classified as instances of the genres based on the respective genre definitions.57 Just as genre conventions are not understood as purely historical, also text types are not conceived as purely systematic or theoretical entities here. Whenever text types are derived from a corpus of literary texts, they involve a historical element because the texts were produced in a specific historical setting. Following Hempfer’s assumption that generic norms and expectations enter literary texts and are readable from them as normative facts, the conventional genres influence the text types. Otherwise, there would not be any textual genres at all. More distant to the historical genre conventions are text types that are defined on general theoretical principles without recourse to specific text corpora, for example, text types that are formulated according to a general theory of language or literature. Similar to theoretically defined genres, these could be used as testable hypotheses with regard to literary text types, i.e. to check to what extent they represent actual textual patterns. When such theoretical text types also refer to generic conventions, they are theories about textual genres. That is, theories of literary textual genres can be more inclined towards genre conventions – if they concentrate on historically bound discursive expectations towards literary texts and relate them to textual characteristics – or they can be inclined towards text types if they start from systematic definitions of text groups and relate them to conventional generic terms.
70Which consequences does this terminological system have for digital genre stylistics? First: there is room for experimentation. For Moretti, through digitally-based, formal, and quantitative analysis, literary criticism is transformed into an experiment:
a few years, and we’ll be able to search just about all novels that have ever been published, and look for patterns among billions of sentences [...] By sifting through thousands of variations and permutations and approximations, a quantitative stylistics of the digital archive may find some answers. It will be difficult, no doubt, because one cannot study a large archive in the same way one studies as text: texts are designed to ‘speak’ to us [...] but archives [...] say absolutely nothing until one asks the right question. [...] it turns criticism on its head, and transforms it into an experiment of sorts: ‘questions put to nature’ is how experiments are often described, and what I’m imagining here are questions—put to culture. Difficult; but too interesting not to give it a try. (Moretti 2008, 114Moretti, Franco. 2008. “The Novel: History and Theory.” New Left Review 52: 111–124. Accessed January 28, 2023. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii52/articles/franco-moretti-the-novel-history-and-theory.)
71By not presupposing theoretically how text types should be constituted to match historical genre conventions in the best way and by not demanding a relationship of inclusion between text types and conventional genres, experiments with different kinds of textual features are possible and can lead to new insights about textual genres. One possible analysis scenario is outlined here:
72However, the distinction between literary text types, conventional genres, and textual genres does not only allow for testing how relevant certain general textual features are to capture the connections between the levels of text and convention. On the other hand, one can as well start from theories of textual genres. Such an analysis scenario is sketched here as an example. For instance, it would be possible to depart from a definition of the historical novel as a novel that is characterized by
73There is another consequence of the terminological distinction between literary text types, conventional genres, and textual genres for a corpus-based digital genre analysis aiming to mediate between genre conventions and text characteristics. It is important to clarify and explain several aspects of the data and the analysis:
74Clarifying the target genre convention and making the procedure of assignment of genre labels to the texts in the collection transparent is crucial if the digital stylistic analysis aims to contribute to existing literary-historical research and if it seeks to find out about genres and not only text types. For very large corpora, assigning genre labels by hand may be unfeasible. One option is to use available bibliographic sources in digital format that are processable with scripts and to collect genre labels automatically. Even if labels are assigned individually and manually to the works, it is often necessary to rely on several sources. Single sources usually do not cover all the texts in a corpus, so different kinds of genre conventions may be involved. For example, the genre labels can originate from scholarly handbooks or library catalogs, thus involving two different kinds of systematic approaches to the genres. Even if several sources are used, it is probable that there remain texts of the broader context whose generic status cannot be clarified beforehand, for instance, if they have not been in the focus of scholarly, librarian, or public attention at all. To what extent historical labels can be used depends on the availability of historical editions and book covers. Because the use of large corpora makes it more difficult to pursue a uniform strategy for genre assignments, it is even more important to set out in detail how the task was solved and to discuss the consequences for the textual genre that is determined in the analysis.
75As the text types in digital genre analyses are determined through text style, it is important to model factors which influence it, and this is also connected to the question of corpus building. Ultimately, the goal is not just to find arbitrary text types but to delimit textual genres in which textual similarities and communicative generic norms converge. How to find out if the facts found in the texts actually represent normative facts that are due to genre conventions and not traces of other intra- or extra-textual factors? Every genre analysis, a stylistic and also a non-stylistic one, has to make sure that the text corpus does not only consist of texts written by one or a few authors so that the claims built on the corpus analysis are not only about individual authors but about the genre. The issue is, however, more complicated in a stylistic analysis because all characteristics of the texts that are taken into account, modeled, or found lead to the text style or are derived from it. For instance, authorship can be primarily marked by a certain authorial style, and that style can be captured through the analysis of high-frequency words. Yet, the same words can also be properties that give evidence of some higher-order structural concept. For example, the type of narrator that is used in a narrative text can influence the number of specific personal pronouns. There can also be properties that are related to the textual genre, for instance, many general descriptive passages in novels of customs, which lead to a comparatively higher number of undetermined articles. To make sure that it is the genre convention that is captured with the overlap of genre labels and text types, it is, therefore, necessary to control and check possible interfering factors in the text style by modeling them as metadata and considering them in the process of text selection.
76Several aspects remain that need to be clarified in connection with the systematic or historical status of text types and genres. In chapter 2.1.2.1 above, there was a focus on semiotic theories of genres and on generic terms. How can these models be understood in connection with text types, conventional genres, and textual genres? When they are used to analyze historical generic terms, they approach these with a language-based, communicative theory to find out which levels of discourse the terms address. This means that the norms that a conventional genre involves are described as characteristics of texts as speech acts. Following Raible’s model, for example, the subgenre novela documentaria would point to the level of the relationship between text and reality (a documenting activity purports that reality is depicted) and the level of the kind of linguistic representation (a documentary style is likely to be neutral and descriptive). These characteristics can be taken as hypotheses about the text types that relate to the conventional genres and thereby also as hypotheses about the features of textual genres, considering that for a stylistic analysis, all these hypotheses would have to be broken down to the level of linguistic representation. Furthermore, the semiotic models of genre constitute a possibility to differentiate between the various discursive levels on which sets of genres are defined, which can help to define more meaningful comparisons of genres. In the case of the novel, for instance, there is a wealth of subgenres, some of which emphasize similar aspects of speech acts and others entirely different ones. The more different the discursive levels are that the generic terms point to, the more probable it is that also the corresponding textual genres are defined on different levels, that the groups of texts associated with the genre conventions overlap, and also that the generic conventions might be different in kind. For example, it seems useful to compare sentimental novels to historical novels if both are interpreted as being defined primarily on a thematic level. On the other hand, it is less fruitful to directly contrast sentimental and romantic novels because the latter often (but not always) have a sentimental theme. In addition, the label “romantic” points to a certain aesthetic movement that was dominant in a specific period of time and not necessarily to thematic elements. This is not to say that sentimental or historical novels are only defined thematically, only that comparing these subgenres makes the most sense on a discursive level that is a prominent reference point for both.
77A closer look at Schaeffer’s explanations is useful to further understand how the semiotic approach to genre relates to the three terms of text type, conventional genre, and textual genre proposed here. In the last part of his book “Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire?”, he discusses generic regimes and logics, by which he means the kinds of relationships that individual texts have with “their genre”, and how these regimes are connected to the generic names (Schaeffer 1983, 156Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). Basically, he distinguishes between the relationships of exemplification and modulation. By exemplification, he means that texts instantiate genres globally (the whole text as a communicational act represents the genre, and not only parts of it) and without modifying the genre itself (the text is only an example of the genre, the genre stays the same). The discursive level to which generic names refer in such cases is the communicational act. In that case, the genre is not defined in textual (syntactic and semantic) terms but in pragmatic ones, concerned with the discursive attitude and the global intention. The type of convention that is involved in such cases is a constituting one. That is, one cannot depart from the convention to a certain degree but only fulfill it completely or fail to do so entirely. According to Schaeffer, cases of genres that can be exemplified are, for instance, drama or narration. If a literary work is conceived as a drama, that is the case independently of its exact form. Even if it contains narrative passages, it is still a drama, because the genre is not understood as being dependent on the actual textual realization but on the outer communicative level (Schaeffer 1983, 156–164Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). Schaeffer’s regime of exemplification is a bit difficult to grasp. It seems close to the concepts of mode and Schreibweisen that Todorov, Hempfer, and Genette develop because it refers to basic discursive attitudes that are linguistically motivated and tend to be historically invariant. However, Schaeffer uses nouns and not adjectives when he refers to this type of genre, and he relates the terms to literary works as a whole, which makes it more challenging to differentiate the genres by example from the historical genres. Schaeffer relates this generic regime to a “constituting” convention.
78The second main type of generic logic that Schaeffer describes, the modulation, is, on the other hand, concerned with the syntactic and semantic entities that texts are. As soon as these discursive levels are addressed, Schaeffer claims, the relationship to the genre cannot be simply exemplifying anymore. Except for the special case of exact copies, each text is individual in this respect and always modifies the genre with which it is associated. In the case of modulation, the determination of the genre depends on the individual works and, thereby, also on the specific historical context in which the works are situated. The same generic names “drama” and “narration” can also be examples of the modulating logic if they refer to specific textual elements such as character constellations, themes, or elements of style. Schaeffer divides this regime further into
| niveau | référent | relation | définition | description | convention | écart |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| acte communicationnel | propriété | exemplification globale | en compréhension | contrastive | constituante | échec |
| texte | règle | modulation par application | prescriptive | énumérative | régulatrice | violation |
| classe généalogique | modulation hypertextuelle | heuristique | spécifiante | traditionelle | transformation | |
| classe analogique | modulation par ressemblance | statistique | typisante | — | variation |
79Three colors are used here to highlight the parts of the table that are related to text types (orange), conventional genres (dark green), and textual genres (light green) – no colors are used in Schaeffer’s original table. Text types correspond to the logic of modulation by resemblance, which leads to classes of similar texts that are defined statistically. Schaeffer has a double line between the last row of the table and the upper three ones, showing that he sees a clear difference between this generic logic and the other types involving different kinds of conventions. However, for the three generic logics of global exemplification, modulation by application, and hypertextual modulation, the conventional level is not clearly separated from the textual level. They mainly describe how that genre is constituted, for example, as a set of rules that are listed in a poetic formulation of a genre and that have a prescriptive character or as a heuristic description based on works that are traditionally associated with a genre. The two columns “relation” and “écart” (deviation), in contrast, describe to how a specific text instantiates a generic convention and how it may deviate from it. They can be interpreted in terms of the textual genre – as the point of contact between the text type that the text in question belongs to and the conventional genre that it participates in, even if Schaeffer focuses on divergence (modulation, deviation, violation, transformation) rather than intersection. Nevertheless, in Schaeffer’s approach, the levels of conventional genre and textual genre are intertwined. On the other hand, resemblance on the textual level is seen as not being related to the conventions at all, disconnecting the text types from the generic conventions. If one were to transfer this view to digital stylistic genre analysis, which is based on text features that are statistically evaluated, this would mean that it operates in another sphere, which has nothing to say about the literary-historical context of genres. Against this, the initial separation of the textual from the conventional level that is proposed in this study is not meant to isolate both concerns but to provide a more open basis for comparison so that the connections and disconnections of the two levels can be analyzed.
80Another question that needs to be addressed is which kind of phenomena that are related to literary-historical conventions can be considered conventional genres. Is an aesthetic movement a genre? Literary genre theorists have different views on this topic. Todorov, for example, explicitly excludes literary movements from his concept of genre, but he does so because he presupposes textual coherence for genres, which according to him, cannot be expected with certainty for literary movements:
Since a genre is the historically attested codification of discursive properties, it is easy to imagine the absence of either of the two components of the definition: historical reality and discursive reality. In the absence of historical reality we would be dealing with the categories of general poetics that are called – depending upon textual level – modes, registers, styles, or even forms, manners, and so on. The ‘noble style’ or ‘first person narration’ are indeed discursive realities; but they cannot be pinned down to a single moment in time: they are always possible. By the same token, in the absence of discursive reality, we would be dealing with notions that belong to literary history in the broad sense, such as trend, school, movement, or, in another sense of the word, ‘style’. (Todorov 2014, 200–201Todorov, Tzvetan. 2014. “The Origin of Genres.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 193–209. New York: Routledge.)61
81With discursive properties, Todorov means textual elements like phonetic or phonological features, thematic elements, and plot structure, but also aspects of the communicative level of texts, such as the factual or fictional status of the utterance (Todorov 2014, 199Todorov, Tzvetan. 2014. “The Origin of Genres.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 193–209. New York: Routledge.). Using the example of symbolism, he explains that it is known that this literary movement existed historically but that it is not proven that the works of authors identified with this movement (which would then be, for example, symbolistic poems) are characterized by common discursive properties. Instead, the movement may only have been based on friendships or manifests (Todorov 2014, 202Todorov, Tzvetan. 2014. “The Origin of Genres.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 193–209. New York: Routledge.). How can one be sure that there is no discursive reality or textual coherence behind works that are associated with a literary current? I am in favor of the position that this should not be ruled out in advance per definition but that it should be tested empirically, just as the textual coherence of conventional genres in the narrower sense should be examined. Digital genre stylistics provide good opportunities to do so. If there are explicit manifests and poetic writings that define literary schools and movements as frames of expectation for the creation and reception of literary works, this can be taken as proof of their relevance as historical, literary institutions. By locating literary movements on the level of conventional genres, nothing is said in advance about their relationship to text types and their significance as textual genres. However, for Todorov, like for Fricke, purely conventional genres are no genres, or at least they should not be called “genres”: “Genres are the meeting place between general poetics [concerned with the theoretical definition of text types] and event-based literary history [concerned with the historical study of the expression of literary conventions]” (Todorov 2014, 201Todorov, Tzvetan. 2014. “The Origin of Genres.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 193–209. New York: Routledge.). Both Fricke and Todorov only see textual genres as genres, which shows that their genre concepts are primarily theoretically anchored, despite the references that they make to the relevance of a historical foundation for the definition of textual genres.
82In the semiotic models of Raible and Schaeffer, literary movements are not directly included either. Even so, Schaeffer discusses their status in the explanations accompanying his core model of discursive levels to which generic terms point. He explains that there are generic terms that cannot be ascribed to the five levels of the verbal act that he defines, for example, terms that refer to the context, place, and time of the speech act. Schaeffer explains that he does not directly include them in his model but that numerous generic terms exist that refer to these aspects, for example, the “baroque sonnet” or the “Greek epic” (Schaeffer 1983, 117–118Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). According to Schaeffer, such genre names reinforce how important the historical context is for the determination of genres. Together with the multiple dimensions of the verbal act that are addressed by generic terms, they show that genres cannot be reduced to texts as entire, whole objects (Schaeffer 1983, 119Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). In the context of this thesis, it was noted that also many generic terms that are associated with nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels refer to time and space. As an extension of Schaeffers model, the levels of temporal and spatial context are therefore included to organize the subgenre labels in the bibliography and corpus presented in chapter 3.62 Here, references to literary currents are described as labels that relate to the temporal context because literary periods are often named after such movements, and the currents are usually phenomena that are temporally limited.
83Fowler utters another critical view on literary movements in relation to genres. In his book on kinds of literature, he mentions them in a section called “Other types”, which is part of the chapter devoted to the definition of modes and subgenres: “The system of generic categories is complicated by the existence of several other quasi-generic groupings. These include [...] the collective productions of ‘schools’ or movements (Metaphysical; Romantic; Georgian). They must be mentioned only to be dismissed” (Fowler 1982, 126–127Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). Fowler describes them as a “collective œuvre” and says that the features that literary works associated with schools or movements have may be “extensive and coherent enough to suggest genre” but that “they exhibit them independently of the historical kinds” (Fowler 1982, 128Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). With that, Fowler means that the common features that different works belonging to a particular movement share crisscross the boundaries of the genres that he calls the historical kinds. As an example, he mentions the Metaphysical poets who wrote in different poetic genres. Fowler states that these poems could be more similar to each other than works of the same poetic genre that belonged to various schools, for instance, different love elegies (Fowler 1982, 128Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). This is, however, only a problem if genre is not analyzed on different discursive levels and varying levels of generality and if it is assumed that there are no overlapping associations of literary works with different kinds of genres. If the love elegy is conceived as being primarily thematically defined (as involving the lament for a tragic love) and a metaphysic poem primarily formally – on the level of representation (as including innovative use of metaphors and allegories), then these two main characteristics do not exclude each other. The metaphysic poem and the love elegy can be understood as two different conventional genres overlapping with different text types. If Fowler says that metaphysical poems are more similar to each other than love elegies of different schools, this could even mean that the conventional genre “metaphysical poem” is textually more coherent than the conventional genre “love elegy”. Fowler’s argument is, therefore, no obstacle to also considering kinds that are conditioned by literary movements as genres.
84A literary scholar who does not see a principle difference between literary genres and movements is Schlickers. In her book about the naturalistic Spanish-American novel, she argues that this distinction is not necessary. First, she confirms that the term “novela naturalista” indeed served as a generic name in the nineteenth century:
La denominación del objeto de este estudio, sin embargo, no causa mayores problemas, porque la noción de ‘novela naturalista’ (y sus variantes) funciona(ba) como nombre genérico, indicando, pues, cierta clase de textos literarios y revelando así una conciencia histórica del género, que influía tanto en la producción como en la recepción de las novelas. (Schlickers 2003, 16Schlickers, Sabine. 2003. El lado oscuro de la modernización: estudios sobre la novela naturalista hispanoamericana. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.)63
85Then she discusses the status of the naturalistic novel as a historical and systematic category. According to Schlickers, there is no clear generic model for the naturalistic novel when compared, for example, to the picaresque novel, for which several constant and variable textual characteristics are known: “La novela naturalista, por el contrario, parece constituir más bien una corriente o un movimiento literario” (Schlickers 2003, 16Schlickers, Sabine. 2003. El lado oscuro de la modernización: estudios sobre la novela naturalista hispanoamericana. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.). However, Schlickers says that all of the terms “current”, “movement”, “genre”, and “poetic school” are debatable and have similar extensions, although different intensions. She is in favor of modeling the naturalistic novel as a subgenre because the works that are associated with this convention repeatedly reference the same prototypical works of the French naturalistic tradition. This shows that there was an awareness of the genre and that the works in question constitute a series of naturalistic novels. Schlickers states that conceptualizing the naturalistic novel as a subgenre allows one to analyze its distinctive features, which guarantee the coherence of the texts associated with Naturalism. At the same time, analyzing the naturalistic novel as a subgenre can serve as a constructive and heuristic means by which imprecise and contradictory textual features and purely poetological particularities can be considered (Schlickers 2003, 17Schlickers, Sabine. 2003. El lado oscuro de la modernización: estudios sobre la novela naturalista hispanoamericana. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.). Here she assumes that there is a textual genre “novela naturalista”, but that it is not entirely congruent with the conventional genre. The case of the Spanish-American naturalistic novels is only one specific historical example of a convention that is usually described as part of a literary school or movement, but that could also be conceived as a genre. In the present study, the example of the Spanish-American naturalistic novel is taken as an argument in favor of the possibility of understanding literary currents as a type of subgenre. Digital genre stylistics can contribute to expanding the limited knowledge about common textual characteristics of literary currents, and in particular of the naturalistic novels to which Schlickers points.
86Discussing whether literary movements can be understood as genres or not leads over to the issue of theoretically separating genres from other discursive entities and of the place of genres in a system or hierarchy of forms – also beyond the question of the difference between text types and genres. There has been much research in literary genre theory on this topic, and a range of different terminological systems have been proposed. They cannot all be reviewed here, so only selected systems are presented shortly. It will be clarified how the different kinds of theoretical, generic terms that have been proposed relate to the three terms of text type, conventional genre, and textual genre defined above. Furthermore, as the empirical part of this study is concerned with subgenres of the novel, a point of interest is how genres and subgenres relate to each other. A terminological system that is prominent in the German-speaking context is the one proposed by Hempfer.64 On the one hand, he proposes to use the word “genre” (in German, “Gattung”) as a meta-theoretical term which may include all other terms used to designate kinds of texts (Hempfer 1973, 16–18Hempfer, Klaus W. 1973. Gattungstheorie. Information und Synthese. München: Fink.), as for example “meta-genre”, “subgenre”, “form”, “kind”, “mode”, “species”, “variety”, “text type”, or “text class”. This general, meta- or pre-theoretical use of the term “Gattung” is what also Fricke (1981, 133Fricke, Harald. 1981. Norm und Abweichung. Eine Philosophie der Literatur. München: Beck.) suggests. When no further theoretical distinctions are made, the term “genre” is used in this general sense here, as well. On a second level below the most general meta-term, Hempfer defines several theoretical terms for specific kinds of text groupings. The main components of his terminological system are “Schreibweise” (“diction”), “Typ” (“type”), “Gattung” (“genre”), and “Untergattung” (“subgenre”). “Dictions” are defined as ahistorical constants (e.g., “the narrative”, “the dramatic”, “the satiric”); “types” as trans-temporal forms of dictions, that is, as the theoretically possible set of types derived from them; “genres” as historical and concrete realizations of the general dictions (e.g., “novel”, “epopee”, “verse satire”); and “subgenres” as subtypes of single genres (e.g., “picaresque novel”, “pathetic verse satire”). According to Hempfer, types and genres can both be derived from dictions via transformations, which means that his system builds on a dynamical and structural concept and not a hierarchical one. Genres and subgenres do not need to be based only on one diction but can be derived from several ones (e.g., a “comic epic”). In addition, Hempfer uses the term “Sammelbegriff” (“collective term”) for terms that designate classes in a logical sense. Individual texts can be assigned to such classes on the basis of any characteristic (e.g., “poetry” as texts in verse form) (Hempfer 1973, 27–28Hempfer, Klaus W. 1973. Gattungstheorie. Information und Synthese. München: Fink.). Comparing Hempfer’s system to the three terms of text type, conventional genre, and textual genre used here, the following observations can be made. The term that is closest to the text type is Hempfer’s Sammelbegriff because it designates a purely logical grouping without necessary relationships to a certain theory of genre or a genre convention. However, the Sammelbegriff is different in that it presupposes logical classes, which is not done for the text type here. The categorical status of text types and textual genres has to be clarified further, which is done in chapter 2.1.4 below. Not only common but also similar features of texts can be constitutive for text types. Hempfer’s Gattung corresponds roughly to the textual genre in that it designates groups of texts that share textual features for which there is historical evidence and which were relevant as communicative norms. A slight difference is that the textual features of Hempfer’s Gattungen are derived from the features of underlying ahistorical constants, whereas the aspect of the origin and motivation of the textual characteristics is not covered by the terminological distinction proposed here. Hempfer’s Untergattungen can be considered subtypes of textual genres. As far as I can see, there is no equivalence to the purely conventional genre in Hempfer’s system of terms. Hempfer’s Schreibweisen and Typen as purely theoretical terms are not covered here, which shows that the three proposed terms of text type, conventional genre, and textual genre focus on the mediation of text-immanent generic features and text-external communicational as well as purely conventional aspects of genres on an empirical level. It is a further task to build new theories based on textual genres that are found in this process of mediation or to clarify their relationship to existing literary theories of genre.
87Another system of terms is used by Fowler, who distinguishes between “kinds”, which are the historical genres (e.g., sonnet, parable), “modes”, which are selections or abstractions from kinds (e.g., comic, aphoristic), “subgenres”, which are subtypes of kinds (e.g., sea eclogue, historical novel), and “constructional types”, which are purely formal patterns (e.g., ring composition, sequence). To distinguish between the different sorts of generic categories, Fowler uses the idea of a “generic repertoire”, which means all possible levels on which features that are characteristic of a genre can be chosen. A basic distinction is made between “formal” and “substantive” features. Formal features include structural characteristics and, for example, verse metres. Substantive features are, for instance, related to themes, purpose, and intended audience. The kinds usually combine both types of features, whereas the constructional types are only based on formal features. Modes are more or less unstructured. They have no or only a few formal features but invoke kinds through samples of their substantive features. The subgenres are defined as having the same formal features as their corresponding kind, plus additional characteristics related to the content of the texts (Fowler 1982, 55–56Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). Evaluating the relationship of Fowler’s terms to text types, conventional genres, and textual genres, the following observations can be made: kinds can be understood as corresponding more or less to the textual genres and subgenres to subtypes of textual genres. What Fowler emphasizes repeatedly is the historical variability of the kinds’ features.65 This raises the question of whether one kind should be conceived as one textual genre allowing for internal variation or eventually several textual genres based on more compact text types. This question will be addressed in the next chapter 2.1.4 on categorization. However, Fowler also states that despite all variation and historical change, kinds are not indeterminate. Preliminarily, he defines them as follows: “a kind is a type of literary work of a definite size, marked by a complex of substantive and formal features that always include a distinctive (though not usually unique) external structure” (Fowler 1982, 74Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). As Hempfer’s Schreibweisen, also Fowler’s modes are not directly covered by the concepts of text type, conventional genre, and textual genre. The latter refer to literary texts as structural units, whereas the former are abstracted and disconnected from external structures: “Modes have always an incomplete repertoire, a selection only of the corresponding kind’s features, and one from which overall external structure is absent” (Fowler 1982, 107Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). 66 When modes are combined with kinds and when they characterize the kinds in more detail, the combination of mode and kind is regarded as a subgenre here (for example, a “comic novel”).
88In this study, no principle difference is made between genres and subgenres. Like genres, also subgenres can be conventional genres, and they can overlap with text types to form textual genres. One difference between both is that the genres usually have a more precise formal delimitation than different subtypes of the same genre. The latter tend to be based on differences in subject matter or style so that different textual characteristics and features become relevant in each case. In addition, subgenres can be very inconsistent because they are formally less fixed than genres. As Fowler remarks, “To determine the features of a subgenre is to trace a diachronic process of imitation, variation, innovation—in fact, to verge on source study. At the level of subgenre, innovation is life” (Fowler 1982, 114Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). It can therefore be more challenging to find the correspondences between conventional subgenres and text types than between conventional genres and text types, and hence be more challenging to determine the textual subgenres than textual genres. However, the degree of innovation that subgenres undergo depends on the type of subgenre that is investigated and on factors such as canonicity and perceived literariness of the works. Especially in popular literature, it is to be expected that there are works that follow quite schematic patterns of subgenres.
89Even if the levels of genre and subgenre are not strictly separated here, it makes sense to consider them in the construction of the corpus to be analyzed to compare genres on a similar level of specificity. If subgenres are the point of interest, it makes sense to build a corpus of instances of the corresponding genre and to include works in it that are associated with different types of subgenres. Then the selection criteria for the corpus as a whole can be based on the formal characteristics that define the genre. That way, determining textual subgenres does not need to be restricted by defining text types beforehand. Different subgenres of the contextualizing major genre can then be contrasted with each other. The relationship of subordination between genres and subgenres is a means of combining a deductive with an inductive procedure in constructing a corpus. Other strategies are conceivable, for example, to combine historical labels as signals for conventional genres with preliminary (sub)genre definitions as proxies to textual genres to build a corpus from which to start the analysis.
90That genre in the narrower sense (Gattung, kind, conventional, and textual genre) is bound to certain features of formal structure has already been pointed out. Which textual entity is the one that participates in genre? Raible sees an affinity between genres and specific degrees of complexity. He observes that, in general, text is a relative and dynamic notion. A novel such as “Eugenie Grandet” by Balzac is a text, but the series of novels that it belongs to, the “Comédie humaine”, or only a subpart of the novel such as a single chapter, are also texts. Usually, genre is bound to the level of the single, whole novel (Raible 1980, 327Raible, Wolfgang. 1980. “Was sind Gattungen? Eine Antwort aus semiotischer und textlinguistischer Sicht.” Poetica 12: 320–349.). Instances of this kind of textual entity are the ones that are collected in a corpus, that are associated with one or several genres, and that are analyzed as to their textual coherence and compliance with generic conventions. However, a novel like “Eugenie Grandet” is a literary work, and as such, it can be realized as text in different forms and contexts. Is genre linked to the literary work as a whole or a specific realization of it in text form? How stable is the association between the literary work or text and the genre? In principle, it is assumed that the generic identity of a text is identical to the generic identity of the work that the text represents. This means that an English translation of “Eugenie Grandet” would generally be considered as participating in the same genre as the original French text. Different editions of a work in the same language but published in different years or even centuries would also commonly be associated with the same genre. If there is a new work, also the genre may be different. “Eugenie Grandet” as a drama or movie would be a new work and have a different genre. If one looks more closely, this question is, however, not so easy to resolve. First, one can debate whether a new version of a text is another realization of the same work or another work.67 Second, as genres are conventions that can be described as literary institutions and as horizons of expectation for authors, publishers, readers, critics, etc., which are anchored in specific historical settings, the generic identity of a work can be influenced by the context in which it is realized. This is illustrated clearly by Schaeffer, who discusses the example of the story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”, which was published in 1939 by Jorge Luis Borges. The story centers on the idea that the fictional author Pierre Menard publishes parts of the work “Don Quijote” as his own creation in the twentieth century, although formally, they correspond exactly to the text authored by Cervantes and published in the early seventeenth century. As Schaeffer illustrates, the syntactically identical text would have different generic identities because in the twentieth century, it would be considered a historical novel with an archaic style, whereas in the seventeenth century, it was primarily received as a parody on romances of chivalry (Schaeffer 1983, 131–134Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). In this case, also the author is different, and one could therefore speak of two different works when comparing the original “Don Quijote” to the imagined twentieth-century recreation of it. Nevertheless, the example makes clear that the generic identity of a literary work may depend on its realization as a document in a specific context.
91In the digital bibliography of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels created for this study, there are examples of works that have been associated with different subgenres of the novel in different editions, marked by different subtitles. For instance, the novel “Tomochic” by the Mexican writer Heriberto Frías was first published in 1894 with the subtitles “Episodios de la Campaña de Chihuahua. 1892. Relación escrita por un testigo presencial”. In 1899, it was republished without any subtitle, and in 1906, the subtitle was changed to “Novela histórica mexicana”. This shows how the novel was initially presented as a testimony and a contemporary documentary novel, and only twelve years later, it was considered a historical novel. Modern critics have interpreted it as a historical, political, social, realist, and naturalistic novel.68 Such generic variability of individual literary works can be clarified when considering it in relation to concepts of text type, conventional genre, and textual genre. Concerning its text-immanent characteristics, and more specifically, its stylistic features, the work does not change over time because these do not depend on the communicative and historical context in which it is embedded through its various realizations. For this to be true, the simplifying assumption is made that the different published editions do not involve considerable textual adaptations of the work. This means that the different text types that the work can belong to do not change. They depend on the textual level and the kind of textual features that are selected for the analysis (for example, most frequent words or topics). What may have changed in a different historical context is the conventional genre, that is, the concept of the genre that was effective at the time, as well as the specific communicative context in which the work is to be seen, which involves the expectations of publishers and readers. It may then be the case that the work did not fit the conventional criteria for a historical novel when it was first published but that it did with the 1906 edition. The concept of the historical novel may have changed by that time. Furthermore, the novel only falls into the definitory pattern of the historical novel once there is a greater distance between its creation and publication year, which means that the perspective on it has changed. If the generic convention that the literary work is associated with is a different one, also the textual genre becomes another one because it is derived from a different intersection of genre label and text type.
92Again, this makes clear that digital stylistics must take conventional genres into account if it aims to produce text analysis results that are historically adequate. In addition, when a corpus is created for digital stylistic analysis, the question of generic identity of the individual texts has to be tackled. For the corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels created here, it was decided to attribute all subgenre assignments directly to the work level. As laid out in more detail in the chapter on creating the bibliography and corpus, it was encoded if the assignments are contemporary or literary-historical. The boundary between both was drawn based on two criteria: first, the temporal limits of the corpus, and second, the origin of the genre label as endogenous and textual or exogenous and meta-textual. As the corpus covers works that were first published between 1830 and 1910, subgenre assignments that were made after 1910 are considered literary-historical, and the ones before that year as contemporary. In addition, the labels that are derived from paratextual signals are differentiated from the ones that external actors conferred. So in this concrete case, for the purpose of subgenre assignment, a simplification was made by defining the period that is covered by the corpus as broadly homogeneous regarding the historical genre conventions. This was done because the change over time of individual subgenres is not the primary concern of the analysis conducted here. If it was, it would have been more important to consider the changing conventional generic identities.
93At the beginning of this chapter, several core issues regarding the relationship between the theory and the history of genres were raised. The last one, referring to the origin and evolution of genres, has yet to be discussed. Theories for genre change are an extensive topic of their own, and literary genre theorists have made several different propositions in this regard. For example, Todorov presents a theory about the origin of genres: “Where do genres come from? Quite simply from other genres. A new genre is always the transformation of an earlier one, or of several: by inversion, by displacement, by combination” (Todorov 2014, 197Todorov, Tzvetan. 2014. “The Origin of Genres.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 193–209. New York: Routledge.). He thus sees the generic system as one that is in constant transformation, and he approaches the question of the formation of genres not through historical analysis but through systematic considerations. Different types of genres are compared to other kinds of speech acts to which they are related. For example, the prayer as a genre is related to praying as a speech act, the novel to telling, and the sonnet to “sonneting”, which does not exist as an institutionalized speech act. Todorov concludes that different kinds of developments are involved, from general simple speech acts to more complex literary genres, but that in general, genres derive from “normal” language: “that makes it possible to see that there is not an abyss between literature and what is not literature, that the literary genres originate, quite simply, in human discourse” (Todorov 2014, 208Todorov, Tzvetan. 2014. “The Origin of Genres.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 193–209. New York: Routledge.). In the more historically oriented genre theories, generic change does not need an independent explanation because it is a central part of the genre concepts. For example, of the three generic logics Schaeffer proposes, three are based on the principle of modulation, which entails that each text that participates in a genre modifies the genre characteristics (Schaeffer 1983, 166Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). The dynamic of genre change is then a question of the extent to which one or several texts alter the genre concept. In Jauß’s theory, the history of genres is explained with the variability of the readers’ (and authors’) horizons of expectations as a “temporal process of the continual founding and altering” (Jauß 2014, 132Jauß, Hans Robert. 2014. “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 127–147. New York: Routledge.). Voßkamp’s idea of genres as literary-social institutions also involves processes of permanent reductions which lead to stabilizations and destabilizations of the institutions (Voßkamp 1977, 30Voßkamp, Wilhelm. 1977. “Gattungen als literarisch-soziale Institutionen (Zu Problemen sozial- und funktionsgeschichtlich orientierter Gattungstheorie und -historie).” In Textsortenlehre – Gattungsgeschichte, edited by Walter Hinck, 27–44. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.). A literary scholar who devoted several book chapters to the transformation of genres is Fowler (Fowler 1982, 149–212Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). He provides an overview of the explanations different genre theorists have developed for the origins and changes of genres and generic systems. Similar to Schaeffer, Jauß, and Voßkamp, Fowler assumes that processes of change are at work constantly, but in his view, these processes are inherently literary and not of a general linguistic or historical nature. Taking into account many literary-historical examples, Fowler describes the main types of transformation processes. Among these, there are topical invention, the combination of generic repertoires, the inclusion of generic repertoires into others, a selection of new repertoire elements from other genres, and their mixture (Fowler 1982, 170Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.).69
94How are processes of generic change to be understood in the context of text types, conventional genres, and textual genres? In general, also change can be described on these three levels: there can be textual change leading to transformed and new text types, change in conventional genres if there is, for example, a poetic discussion resulting in new elements that are considered necessary for a specific genre, or if texts are associated with new conventions through the use of genre signals or labels. The transformation of the textual genres is then a result of the shifts that are at work on the other two levels: if either the text type or the conventional genre or both at the same time change, then also the textual genre becomes different. A more difficult question is where the boundary between one text type and another, one conventional genre and a different one, and hence also between one textual genre and a new one lies. If genre transformations are assumed to be constantly at work, how can the unity of a text type, a conventional genre, or a textual genre be defined at all? This question is crucial not only for the historical change of genres but also for their description from a synchronic perspective. The boundaries between different text types, various conventional genres, and textual genres are not necessarily clear-cut. The overlap of text types and conventional genres can also take several forms. These problems are discussed in chapter 2.1.4, on categorization.
95With access to very large corpora of digital texts that, in theory, can cover whole periods or several periods of literature, digital genre stylistics is enabled to address genre analysis over time. Different approaches to this problem are possible and have been pursued. Although generic change cannot be comprehensively considered in this study, some general remarks on the importance of corpus design in this regard are made. Obviously, a central aspect to capture change over time is the collection of metadata about the creation or publication dates of the literary works that are part of the corpus that is analyzed. Furthermore, decisions have to be made about the status of different editions of the same works. Questions are, for example, if only first historical editions are considered or if modern editions are used, and also if only one edition per work is analyzed or if different versions of works are compared. In most cases in which transformations of genres over time have been analyzed in digital genre stylistics so far, the reference to temporal metadata is the primary strategy to capture change. For example, a corpus can be subdivided into an earlier and a later period, and the texts contained in both partitions can be compared to find the differences between early and late variants of the genres that are covered by the text collection. Such differentiation can also be made in a more granular way, analyzing, for example, differences by decade or by year. Jockers, for example, analyzes the stylistic change of novels in English by decade (Jockers 2013, 82–89Jockers, Matthew L. 2013. Macroanalysis. Digital Methods & Literary History. Topics in the Digital Humanities. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.). Using publication years as the temporal unit, Underwood proposes to adopt the Foote novelty, an algorithm that was originally developed to locate points of significant change in music. Underwood uses the algorithm to detect “revolutions” in the history of the novel (Underwood 2015aUnderwood, Ted. 2015a. “Can we date revolutions in the history of literature and music?” The Stone and the Shell. Using large digital libraries to advance literary history. October 3, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20230303135942/https://tedunderwood.com/2015/10/03/can-we-date-revolutions-in-the-history-of-literature-and-music/. ; Foote 2000Foote, Jonathan. 2000. “Automatic Audio Segmentation Using A Measure of Audio Novelty.” In 2000 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. ICME2000. Proceedings. Latest Advances in the Fast Changing World of Multimedia, 452–455. Vol. 1. New York: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICME.2000.869637.).70 In the mentioned cases, the feature set used to analyze the novels over time is the same for all points in time or periods. What is measured is how the feature distributions change in relation to the temporal metadata. One could propose different historical stages of text types if the values and constellations of the textual features vary considerably between one and another period. Another way to model textual change is to create different feature sets for different points in time or features that develop over time. In that case, a challenge is to clarify how the different feature sets or features are related to each other so that it is possible to speak about a change. For example, there are dynamic topic models in which the composition of the topics evolves temporally (Blei and Lafferty 2006Blei, David M., and John D. Lafferty. 2006. “Dynamic topic models.” In Proceedings of the 23rd International conference on Machine learning (ICML), 113–120. https://doi.org/10.1145/1143844.1143859.). As in the previous cases, the primary concern is the change on the level of the text types. This can be linked to developments of conventional genres if, for instance, metadata about different genre labels that the texts had at different points in time is integrated into the analyses, as Underwood did in his account of Gothic novels (Underwood 2016Underwood, Ted. 2016. “The Life Cycles of Genres.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/16.005.). However, even if the genre labels are constant, changes in the text types produce different intersections with conventional genres and hence altered textual genres.
96Several issues that are related to the question of the systematic or historical nature of literary genres were discussed in this subchapter. Different literary genre theories emphasize the dependence of genres from the historical context to different degrees. Several terminological systems have been developed to distinguish between historically constant and more variable generic notions, between linguistically and text-founded types as well as conventional groupings of texts. Digital genre stylistics has been described here as a field of research in which there is a strong focus on the analysis of text types because groups of literary works are formed and analyzed based on stylistic features that are derived from the linguistic surface of the texts. Then again, in its applied form, digital literary stylistics is mainly concerned with empirical analyses of historical text corpora, so that questions of the historicity of the texts inevitably have to be addressed. Such questions are, for example, which literary period to cover with the corpus, how the literary works in the corpus are dated, which types of editions to use, and from which perspective and based on which sources the generic identity of the works is determined. Usually, it is especially the latter aspect of deciding on the type of genre labels that links digital genre stylistic analyses to modern or historical genre conventions. Literary works in very large digital corpora can normally not be labeled according to purely theoretical criteria that have been developed based on close reading of texts and that require close reading for their application. Instead, the genre labeling of works in large text collections usually needs to be based on categorizations that others have made for part of the texts (authors, editors, readers, critics, librarians, scholars, etc.), so that sets of genre labels are the result of collective decisions influenced by the respective generic conventions and theories that apply.
97Besides selecting genre labels, selecting works for the corpus also means that a connection to contemporary or historical expectations towards genres is established. If, for example, a corpus of novels is assembled to analyze subtypes of novels, the genre discourse is already involved in the outer delimitation of the corpus, even if the subtypes of the novel are defined by relying exclusively on textual surface features. That is, even a text-centered analysis of literary types addresses questions of genre as soon as this notion is part of the definition of the corpus. Therefore, it is argued that both literary text types as systematic groupings of texts based on textual features and conventional literary genres as historically bound literary institutions are important for digital genre stylistic analyses. However, the potential of digital genre stylistics to enhance the knowledge about the literary history of genres can best be developed if literary text types and conventional literary genres are terminologically separated and defined independently of each other in the first place. That way, insights into textual genres are not limited from the outset by requirements of completeness, integrity, or congruence on either of the other two levels. The initial separation of levels on which genres (in the general sense) are analyzed is the more important as stylistic textual features can be very different from the literary features that have been formulated as defining genres either in historical conventions or literary theories, or both. Defining textual literary genres as convergences or intersections of text types and conventional genres allows for finding new correspondences between both perspectives on the genres.
98To consider several levels of analysis for genres and to relate these to each other has also been advocated for in more recent genre theoretical approaches. Gymnich and Neumann (2007Gymnich, Marion, and Birgit Neumann. 2007. “Vorschläge für eine Relationierung verschiedener Aspekte und Dimensionen des Gattungskonzepts: Der Kompaktbegriff Gattung.” In Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte, edited by Marion Gymnich, Birgit Neumann, and Ansgar Nünning, 31–52. Trier: WVT.), for example, propose a “compact definition” (“Kompaktbegriff”) of genre. They consider four main levels of genre analysis (the textual level, the cultural-historical dimension, the individual-cognitive dimension, and the functional dimension) and outline the points of contact between them.71 The levels of literary text types and conventional literary genres proposed here cover, in particular, the textual and the cultural-historical dimensions. Individual-cognitive and functional aspects can also be connected to both of them, even if they are not the primary focus of digital genre stylistics. Compared to the integration of the different analysis levels in the “compact definition” of genre, the convergence of text types and conventional genres in textual genres described here is more concrete because it refers to intersections of text groups. The terminological differentiation between literary text types, conventional, and textual genres relates directly to the possibilities and characteristics of digital quantitative approaches. They need their own genre theoretical foundation, not because they should be isolated from other directions of genre research, but to have adequate terms that allow for communicating and clarifying what genre stylistics can contribute to genre theory and history in general. In the following section, the question of how text types, conventional, and textual genres can be held together and delimited as categories is addressed.
99The idea that genre categories can be conceptualized as logical classes prevailed in genre theory for a long time. From the early poetics onwards, attempts were made to systematize the field of literary texts by grouping them on the basis of formal, functional, and content-related similarities, with the goal to provide “as exact a classification of concrete texts into clearly disjunct classes as possible” (Hempfer 2014, 405Hempfer, Klaus W. 2014. “Some Aspects of a Theory of Genre.” In Linguistics and Literary Studies/Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers/Begegnungen, Interferenzen und Kooperationen, edited by Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob, 405–422. Berlin: De Gruyter.). Besides one-level sets, also hierarchical systems or taxonomies were proposed, requiring distinct and complementary classes. In some cases, they were conceived in analogy to scientific systemizations, particularly biological ones. Bonheim, for example, developed the “cladistic method of classifying genres”, alluding to phylogenetic systematics (Bonheim 1992Bonheim, Helmut. 1992. “The Cladistic Method of Classifying Genres.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 8: 1–32.).72 Strube summarizes the activity of the classifying literary scholar as follows:
100Nevertheless, when classification – in the narrow sense of defining classes that require the presence of a fixed set of features for its members and that fit into a system of non-overlapping categories – is applied to literary genres, there are also limits to its usefulness. Bonheim describes them when pondering the limits of his cladistic method of classifying genres:
There are five distinct grounds why cladograms of genres are fraught with such uncertainties. One has been mentioned: our definitions are not sufficiently encyclopedic. A second one is that genres are alive and change from age to age. A third is that genres in France are different from genres in England or Germany; for it is a common observation that genre terms are frequently untranslatable, and we feel forced to speak of a conte or a Bildungsroman in English and of the villanelle and the short story in German. So genres and genre terms are marked on grounds of national origin as well as history. The fourth reason is that genre terms are rarely terms in the scientific sense, but semi-terms, made grubby by repeated use and misuse. The fifth reason is that every new critical school, like every new drive into the bottomless pit of linguistic theories, calls our attention to some qualities of texts which, as far as we are aware, had not before been clearly brought into focus. That means that every model of genre is an open set of features. No cladogram can be final and valid for all time and users. (Bonheim 1992, 15Bonheim, Helmut. 1992. “The Cladistic Method of Classifying Genres.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 8: 1–32.)
101So among the main problems that Bonheim sees are the dependence on a cultural and linguistic context and the historical variability of genres, which a classificatory approach cannot directly cover. Further problems derive from models’ theory dependence and selectivity, but these are independent of the categorization procedure. Bonheim concludes that definitions of text kinds are, above all, heuristic tools (Bonheim 1992, 16Bonheim, Helmut. 1992. “The Cladistic Method of Classifying Genres.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 8: 1–32.). That classificatory definitions of genres are not able to cover synchronic variation, including the one caused by the individuality of norm-breaking literary works or historical change, has often been adduced. Alternative concepts of categorization have been proposed.74 Strube, on the other hand, defends classificatory procedures by arguing that literary scholars do not classify in the same way as linguists or other empirically working scientists:
Die Voraussetzung, die von den Textsortenlinguisten gemacht wird (nämlich daß es auch in der ‘Welt der Literatur’ scharf abgegrenzte Klassen oder Begriffsextensionen gebe), mag berechtigt sein, solange sie sich auf sogenannte Gebrauchstexte [...] bezieht. Sie auf kompliziertere Arten der Literatur zu beziehen, heißt, in die Irre zu gehen. Wenn überhaupt Begriffe zur Einteilung der (bisherigen) Literatur taugen, dann nicht Textsorten-, sondern Art- und Gattungsbegriffe des vom traditionellen Literaturwissenschaftler gebrauchten Typs. (Strube 1993, 58Strube, Werner. 1993. Analytische Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Definition, Klassifikation, Interpretation und Textbewertung. Paderborn: Schöningh.)
102His remarks can be interpreted as a rejection of classification in the logical sense as the only valid procedure and as an advocation for a broader definition of “classification”, that includes specific soft classificatory terms, which he calls “univocal”, “paronymic”, “porous”, and “family resemblance terms”, of which the univocal terms are closest to classificatory terms in the strict sense (Strube 1993, 13–28Strube, Werner. 1993. Analytische Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Definition, Klassifikation, Interpretation und Textbewertung. Paderborn: Schöningh.).
103As digital genre stylistics is a field in which an empirical methodology prevails, including the use of statistical procedures, also logical classification is part of its repertoire and is repeatedly employed for categorizing literary texts by genre. In many literary stylistic papers, classificatory approaches are used with a focus on which features are most suitable to capture differences between genres, including aspects of style and content, but also structural characteristics of the texts such as text order or representation of speech.75 Digital studies on the classification of genres, in the strict sense of logical classes, are relevant for several reasons:
104As a supervised method, classification has the advantage that the analyzed text classes are directly linked to the genre labels so that the correspondence (or non-correspondence) of generic terms to specific textual features can be checked straightforwardly. Furthermore, the success or failure of the classification can be easily measured by comparing the actual genre labels, that is, the labels that the texts were associated with at the outset of the analysis, to the ones predicted by a classifier. If the genre labels represent the conventional genres and the texts themselves are the data based on which text types can be defined, then supervised classification is an ideal method to test to what extent both levels overlap. The more successful a classification based on selected genre labels and textual features is, the more probable it is that the conventional genres represented by the labels actually correspond to text types defined on the grounds of the selected features. As a consequence, it is also probable that they constitute textual genres. As at least one positive and one negative class are needed for supervised classification, as a minimum, two conventional genres and two text types are involved in such an analysis. The text types are then differentiated not by the kind of features – because the same feature set is used in the whole setting – but by the characteristics of the feature values and how the various feature values are distributed in one text type versus the other. Because the classes are clearly separated from each other, it is possible to inspect the feature distributions in each class to learn about its textual characteristics, and it can also be analyzed which features are decisive to separate one class from the other. This means that text types and textual genres are defined contrastively in a classificatory setting. This highlights the importance of deciding which conventional genres and which literary works associated with them should be analyzed together to find the corresponding text types and textual genres.
105However, it can also turn out that classification does not yield very accurate results, depending on the kind of conventional genre that is analyzed, the individual literary works that participate in it and that are selected for the text corpus, and the textual level that is examined. Then the reasons for the failure have to be investigated. Low classification rates can indicate problems with the selection of features or the classification parameters and methods, but they may also be due to the underlying category not having the structure that is assumed. It can, for example, be checked which works are repeatedly misclassified to find out which part of the corpus is not compatible with the textual genres that the classifier learned. Are there only a few works that do not fit? A closer look at them can serve to check if they can be seen as outliers, as texts participating in the conventional genre but not in the textual one because they are not compatible with the text type underlying the other works of the genre. What if a bigger group of texts is affected by misclassifications? This might indicate that there is more than one text type that is connected to the conventional genre or that no textual unity can be found for it at all. In such cases, alternative categorization methods can complement the classic classification methods to find out how the conventional genre in question is structured internally on the textual level. Considering the observations that have been made in literary theory and history about the individual relationships between literary works and “their” genres and about constant processes of modulation and transformation, it is very probable that there are such cases of conventional genres that cannot be neatly mapped to text types and that are not coherent textual genres.
106Typological approaches to genre categorization are one of the alternatives that already have a tradition in literary genre theory. A typological description of genres starts from individual literary works seen as typical or especially representative of the genre in question. The genre’s characteristics are then derived from the exemplary texts by isolating, generalizing, or even exaggerating their properties. That way, an ideal type is constructed, constituting an extreme case when compared to other types (Strube 1993, 60–61Strube, Werner. 1993. Analytische Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Definition, Klassifikation, Interpretation und Textbewertung. Paderborn: Schöningh.). Following the cognitive-psychological and linguistic theory of the prototype effect, the ideal types have been called “prototypes”. The prototype effect describes general perception and cognition principles involved when humans categorize things. Some instances of categories are recognized faster than others because they have some typical characteristics. The typical features do not even need to be necessary for the category. For example, a prototypical table has four legs, but tables do not need to have this exact number of legs. When things are categorized, they are not checked systematically for present or absent features but are compared to different ideal types based on their attributes. The proximity or distance to an ideal type is decisive for perceiving something as a member of the category in question (Rosch and Mervis 1975Rosch, Eleanor, and Carolyn B. Mervis. 1975. “Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories.” Cognitive Psychology 7: 573–605.; Taylor 2003, 41–62Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic categorization. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.). The resulting categories are different from logical classes. Membership is not based on a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that can either be fulfilled or not and is not simply a question of belonging or not belonging. Prototypical categories have a core and an internal structure that runs from the core to the edges of the category in a continuous way. The edges are not sharp but fuzzy because membership is defined in terms of closeness to the prototypical core, which also entails that there are degrees of membership. As Hempfer, who sounded out the potential of prototype theory for literary genre theory, summarizes:
Given that the difference between categories is constituted by the respective prototypical cores, the problem of ‘boundaries’ loses its poignancy because categories can indeed overlap at their edges when one entity variously resembles different prototypical cores in roughly equal measure. The key factor in the distinction between class inclusion and prototype theory lies in the terminological shift that relocates distinguishing characteristics of categories from their boundaries to their cores and attributes an entity to a category via its relationship of resemblance to the prototypical core. (Hempfer 2014, 412Hempfer, Klaus W. 2014. “Some Aspects of a Theory of Genre.” In Linguistics and Literary Studies/Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers/Begegnungen, Interferenzen und Kooperationen, edited by Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob, 405–422. Berlin: De Gruyter.)
107Hempfer finds that prototype theory is suitable for capturing the relationship of literary works with modes or transhistorical invariants. As an example, he discusses narrative versus dramatic communication. Paradigmatic (that is, prototypical) forms of narration are the epics of Homer or Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”, realistic novels in the nineteenth century, or popular twentieth-century fiction. On the other hand, there are also deviations from the prototypical norm, for example, when drama is narrativized, or narrative is performatized. Nevertheless, untypical instances of narrative or dramatic communication can still be recognized as such as long as they have a closer relationship to their respective prototypical core than to the core of the other category, which according to Hempfer, is also a question of “reference” (Hempfer 2014, 414–415Hempfer, Klaus W. 2014. “Some Aspects of a Theory of Genre.” In Linguistics and Literary Studies/Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers/Begegnungen, Interferenzen und Kooperationen, edited by Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob, 405–422. Berlin: De Gruyter.). In this application of prototype theory to literary genres (in the form of modes), both the levels of the literary text type and the conventional genre are involved. The implicit or explicit reference to a generic prototype must be viewed as a genre signal indicating to which literary institution a text is assigned, while the amount of narrative or performative passages in a text is located on the textual level. This complicates matters because a literary work then has relationships to prototypical cores on two levels: that of the generic convention and that of the text type. Differentiating these levels, as is done in the present study, can mean that a literary work can be closer to a particular conventional prototype because the work carries the respective genre label or other signals pointing to it. At the same time, on the textual level, a work can be closer to a different prototype. As a result, it can be interpreted as an untypical member of two textual genres. As an untypical member of the textual genre (or mode) “narrative”, a narrativized drama can be closer to the narrative literary text type than to the dramatic one but be more distant to the conventional narrative genre than to the dramatic one. Vice-versa, as an untypical member of the textual genre “drama”, it is close to the core of the conventional genre but more distant to the core of the corresponding text type.
108For the theory and history of literary genres, the idea of prototypically organized categories is especially attractive when generic terms refer to genealogical categories established on the basis of tradition, and in which the relationship between the literary works and the genre is characterized by hypertextual modulation (in the terms that Schaeffer (1983, 181Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.) uses to describe this type of generic logic).77 Often, literary works signal their participation in a conventional genre by referencing another work that is viewed as a prototypical representative of the genre, either as a particularly accomplished masterpiece or as the foundational text of the genre.78 Examples of this are references to Walter Scott’s “Waverley” in historical novels or to Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” in education novels. Works that reference their prototype are expected to either imitate it closely or vary it to different degrees. In addition, a literary work can contain references to several different prototypical works. The prototypical genre categories that are grounded on hypertextual relationships are necessarily anchored in time and closely related to the literary-historical context. Literary works can only reference other works that existed before them, and the writers must be aware of the prototypes to which they allude. Furthermore, at least two instances of texts are needed to constitute a genre in this sense: the prototype and a text that references it.
109If prototypical structures are established based on hypertextual relationships, they are, above all, defined as conventional genres. With the help of digital stylistics, it can be examined to what extent the conventional genres that are constituted by tradition and intertextual references have correspondences in literary text types. It can, for example, be checked whether traditional prototypical works also function as cores of genres on the textual level or not and how close or distant other works participating in the genre tradition are to them stylistically.
110Such questions were analyzed by Henny-Krahmer et al. (2018Henny-Krahmer, Ulrike, Katrin Betz, Daniel Schlör, and Andreas Hotho. 2018. “Alternative Gattungstheorien. Das Prototypenmodell am Beispiel hispanoamerikanischer Romane.” In DHd 2018. Kritik der digitalen Vernunft. Konferenzabstracts, Köln, 26.2.-2.3.2018, edited by Georg Vogeler, 105–112. Köln: Universität zu Köln. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4622412.) in an analysis of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels. The novels are associated with the subgenres of sentimental, historical, costumbrista-, gaucho, and anti-slavery novels. For each subgenre, one or several works were predefined as prototypes, following literary-historical indications of their status as ideal types, either as predecessors or as masterpieces and culminations of the subgenres in question. Subsequently, textual similarities of all the novels to the different prototypical works were analyzed based on MFW and topic features. The analysis faced the difficulty that especially the predecessor prototypes can have their origin in other countries (for example, novels from Spain in the case of the costumbrista subgenre) and also in other languages (such as the English “Waverley” for the historical novel or the French “La Nouvelle Héloïse” for the sentimental novel). Furthermore, they can also be chronologically distant from the follower works. “La Nouvelle Héloïse”, for instance, was first published in the eighteenth century. To be able to compare works that were originally written in other languages, Spanish translations of them were used, but it is clear that such cultural, historical, and linguistic differences significantly complicate comparisons of literary texts on a stylistic level. Therefore, it is not surprising that there was a tendency for the follower works to be more similar to each other than each of them was to the respective prototype. In addition, the stylistic coherence of the works of individual subgenres was not clearly visible in all cases, which means that their integrity as textual genres could not be confirmed with certainty.
111The experiment shows that literary-historical generic relationships are not necessarily translatable to a stylistic level. The results of the prototype analysis of the nineteenth-century subgenres of Spanish-American novels also suggest that works which are considered prototypical from a literary-historical point of view might rather be exceptional than typical for a textual genre. Therefore, it could be more useful to look for a prototypical textual core not in the sense of excellent, norm-founding masterpieces but ordinary, average works.
112Considering how computational categorization methods in general relate to prototype structures versus logical classes, it can be noted that there is no direct and exclusive relationship between one method and one theoretical concept of genre categories. The two main types of text categorization methods that are used in machine learning and statistical text analysis are classification and clustering. As classification is a supervised method, its aim is to separate the data points in a way that fits best to the class labels provided with the data. As long as only one label is allowed per data point, the results are exclusive classes that do not overlap. So, at a first glance, it seems that statistical text classification is entirely congruent with the idea of treating genres as classes in the logical sense. Looking closer reveals that statistical classification procedures can also be related to prototypical structures. First, many classification algorithms include calculating scores or probabilities for the class assignments, which means that internally, information is collected about the degree to which an instance can be considered as belonging to one class or another, before the final decision for the output is made.79 This internal data can be interpreted as information about the prototypicality of data points for classes. If classification is used to predict the genre of literary works, the probability with which a certain work is assigned to one genre or the other can also be understood as its proximity or distance to a prototypical core of the genre. Second, the features used for statistical classification are usually not only binary but numerical. When numerical and especially continuous numerical features are involved, decisions are not based on the presence or absence of features but on feature distributions that can be similar or more distant from each other. In the output, the classes have clear boundaries, but they have a complex structure internally. The internal structure of the classes is close to how the prototype effect is described theoretically in linguistics:
I will assume in the following discussion that entities are categorized on the basis of their attributes.1 These are not the binary constructs of the classical approach. Consider the ratio of width to depth. The ratio is a continuous variable. Labov’s results show that associated with each of the categories cup, bowl, and vase, there is a certain optimum value, or range of values, for the width-depth ratio. In categorizing an entity, it is not a question of ascertaining whether the entity possesses this attribute or not, but how closely the dimensions of the entity approximate to the optimum value.
1 From now on I shall restrict the term ‘feature’ for the abstract features of the classical approach, reserving ‘attribute’ for alternative, non-classical theories of categorization.
(Taylor 2003, 44Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic categorization. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.)80
113In statistical classification, optimum values and optimal combinations of values are determined quantitatively. If a model is trained with data that shows a concentration of similar values, value ranges, or value combinations for a class, this subspace of features can be interpreted as the prototypical core of the category to which new instances that are to be classified are related. However, the ultimate goal of supervised classification is not to produce models of prototypically structured categories but to define models that separate the data along the lines of the predefined labels that the training data has and to predict membership in distinct classes. Carried over to the definition of genres, it means that what is learned are text types that correspond as closely as possible to the conventional genres – assuming that the labels are expressions of generic conventions. The text types have clear boundaries, but are (usually) not constituted based on of binary features. The model of the text type can be applied to new literary texts to test whether they comply with it or not. True positives can be interpreted as literary works that belong to the text type and the conventional genre and hence to the textual genre. True negatives belong neither to the text type nor to the conventional genre nor the textual genre in question. False positives are part of the text type but not of the conventional genre and, therefore, also not of the textual genre. False negatives are part of the conventional genre but not of the text type and, consequently, also not of the textual genre. Probabilities can be used to check how certain the assignment of a text to the text type is and, thereby, how close it comes to the prototypical core of the text type.81 However, nothing is said about prototypes of the conventional genre in such a classificatory setting. Prototypicality on the level of convention (and also tradition) is inaccessible to text classification with stylistic features as long as it is not explicitly modeled in the metadata and available in the form of specific genre labels. The cognitive aspect of the prototype model, which involves recognizing instances of categories as a whole and not only as a sum of its parts, is also out of scope for text stylistic categorization: “Finally, it emerges very clearly from Labov’s experiment that no one single attribute, or set of attributes, is essential for distinguishing the one category from the other. Presence of a handle, or function in the drinking of coffee, merely raises the probability that an entity will be categorized as a cup” (Taylor 2003, 44Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic categorization. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.). What can be done is to make clear on which level, textual or non-textual, literary texts are participating in genres or not. The crux with the proposed interpretation of classification results in terms of text types, conventional genres, and textual genres is that it presupposes a good quality of the model. If, for instance, only an overall accuracy of 60 % is reached – is this a sign that the model was not properly trained? Or is it a sign that the conventional genre expressed through the class labels does not correspond to a congruent text type? In such a case, further experimentation and examination of the results are needed, including an analysis of the historical genre conventions that are involved.
114The second main type of computational categorization method, which is also often used in digital genre stylistics, is unsupervised clustering.82 With this approach, the data is partitioned into a certain number of clusters so that data points inside of a single cluster are more similar to each other than to other data points lying outside of it (Müller and Guido 2016, 170Müller, Andreas C., and Sarah Guido. 2016. Introduction to Machine Learning with Python: a Guide for Data Scientists. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.). That the method is unsupervised means that no category labels are used to group the data. In the results, there can be different degrees of similarity between the points in a cluster, between points in different clusters, and also between whole clusters.83 For several clustering algorithms, the cluster centers, called “centroids”, are crucial for defining of the clusters. In K-means clustering, for example, the clusters are described by means of the data points contained in them. These means, which are in general not equal to any of the actual data points, are the cluster centroids (Scikit-learn developers 2007–2023bScikit-learn developers. 2007–2023b. “Clustering, sec. K-means.” Scikit-learn. https://web.archive.org/web/20230304125710/https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html.). For many clustering algorithms, the number of clusters to learn has to be set as a parameter value.84 Some aspects of clustering methods remind us of prototypically organized categories. Each cluster can be interpreted as a category, and their centroids as the ideal prototypes, which represent (but are not equal to) the most typical exemplars of the category. Clusters are formed based on continuous distance relationships between data points and cluster centroids. This corresponds to the idea of prototype categories where some members are central and others marginal. A difference is, however, that clustering results in separate categories which have clear boundaries. However, for single data points, it is possible to calculate the distances to several centroids. That way the cluster boundaries can be crossed when the model is interpreted.
115How could clustering algorithms such as K-means be applied to analyze literary texts and their genres as prototypical structures? The clusters that are found can be interpreted as literary text types that have a prototypical core. The texts that are members of the clusters can be seen as members of the text type with certain proximity or distance to the prototype. In contrast to statistical classification, though, the clustering algorithms determine the text types only through the analysis of feature values and distributions and not by optimizing the relationship between text types and conventional literary genres, because no genre labels are used in the clustering process. Once there is a model of clusters, genre labels can be applied afterward to evaluate to what extent the text types overlap with the conventional genres. The resulting intersections can be interpreted as textual genres. An expectation is that the conventional genres will tend to appear as textually more fragmented when the models are not forced to take into account the traditional genre labels. Therefore, the unsupervised categorization is better suited to detect discrepancies between conventional and textual genres than the supervised approach. However, it is less useful to learn which textual features constitute the common basis for specific conventional genres. Considering the status of the prototypes that are determined through the calculation of cluster centers, they are not to be confounded with literary works that have been described as prototypical and especially influential for a genre by literary historians or that were considered as such by contemporary writers. Instead, these are statistical means of text types and can be viewed as representing the most normal textual characteristics for a literary type. It can be concluded that clustering algorithms are closer to the idea of prototype structures than classification methods, but of course they are also limited to the aspects of categories that are detectable through the textual surface and text style.
116Besides prototypical structures, another alternative approach to conceptualizing genre categories is discussed here: family resemblance networks. The idea to describe categories in analogy to family resemblances goes back to Wittgenstein. In his linguistic-philosophical work, the concept serves to describe linguistic activities involving the use of the same word for phenomena which only have partial and indirect similarities, like the resemblances that can be seen between different members of a family:
Consider, for example, the activities that we call ‘games’. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: ‘They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’’—but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that [...]. And the upshot of these considerations is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing [...]. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblance’; for the various resemblances between members of a family—build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth—overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family. (Wittgenstein 2009, paras 66–67Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. New York: Wiley.)
117Here, the relationships between members of a group are conceptualized as a network of overlapping – but not in all cases common – similarities. The family resemblance analogy was adopted in literary genre theory already in the 1960s. It became popular because it allowed for more open definitions of genre, able to overcome the necessity that the features relevant to a genre should be present in all literary works attributed to it. Such an open concept of genre categories is especially useful for capturing changes in genres over time. These often entail that the same generic term is applied to literary works with quite different textual characteristics between one period and another. The gradual process of change can be understood as a chain of links between individual works in a network, which can be followed. While immediate neighbors in the network share some features, this must no longer be true for distant relationships. However, the details of applying the notion of family resemblance to literary genre theory are not always laid out, even if the approach is mentioned as a possible option by literary theorists. Often, the term is invoked briefly as a counter-concept to logical classes, which are seen as insufficient for the theoretical representation of historically variable genres, for example by Jauß:
The continually new ‘widening of the genre’, in which Croce saw the supposed validity of definitional and normative genre concepts led ad absurdum, describes from another perspective the processlike appearance and ‘legitimate transitoriness’ of literary genres, as soon as one is prepared to desubstantialize the classical concept of genre. This demands that one ascribe no other generality to literary ‘genres’ [...] than that which manifests itself in the course of its historical appearance. By no means must everything generically general – what allows a group of texts to appear as similar or related – be dismissed [...]. Following this line of thought, literary genres are to be understood not as genera (classes) in the logical senses, but rather as groups or historical families. (Jauß 2014, 131Jauß, Hans Robert. 2014. “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 127–147. New York: Routledge.)
118Jauß’s statement shows that the recourse to the family resemblance concept also serves to defend the idea of literary genres per se against the critics who question it entirely. Critics make reference to the constant processes of transformation which are at work when individual works refer to genre conventions and when these individual works contribute to the genre’s modification at the same time. More recently, there has been some consensus that literary genres are not to be equated with logical classes. Fowler gives an overview of the genre concepts that prevailed in the history of genre theory. He takes the position that understanding genres as a means of classification is an error. He sees a practical value in using genres for taxonomic efforts but argues that the principal value of genres is functional: “genres have to do with identifying and communicating rather than with defining and classifying. We identify the genre to interpret the exemplar. [...] If we see The Jew of Malta as a savage farce, our response will not be the same as if we saw it as a tragedy” (Fowler 1982, 38Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.).
119Here, a less critical view of the potential textual reality of genres is maintained. To view “The Jew of Malta” either as a savage farce or as a tragedy would mean to view it in light of two different conventional genres connected with different discursive expectations towards the text. In a stylistic analysis, the text would be grouped together with other instances of the conventional genre in question. Depending on the perspective formed by the selection of other texts and features, different textual clues and “normative facts” can be found as traces of the conventional genres. This does not mean that the chosen generic perspective must lead to the definition of a textual genre based on necessary common features and a definition that fits all exemplars associated with the corresponding conventional genre. However, it is also not excluded from the outset that there can be textual similarities in addition to to the conventional genre’s functional and non-textual communicative characteristics. Fowler goes on to say that the missing necessary common features of genres make their definitions impossible: “Either defining characteristics are absent altogether, or they are limited to meager distinctions that do no more than subdivide the genre. In short, genres at all levels are positively resistant to definition” (Fowler 1982, 40Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). The theory of family resemblance then appears as a solution that allows for describing connections between literary texts participating in the same genre without needing to define what their common characteristics are: “It promises to apply not only to close-knit connections within subgenres [...] but also to far-flung resemblances between widely divergent works [...]. Genres appear to be much more like families than classes” (Fowler 1982, 40Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). It turns out that Fowler puts definitions on a level with logical classes. He states that descriptions of genres in terms of family resemblances should not be seen as preparations of genre definitions as classes but as descriptions of “a different sort of grouping, not reducible to a class” (Fowler 1982, 42Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). Although Fowler advocates for conceptualizing genres as families, he sees a need to modify Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances. According to Fowler, in its original form, it would entirely impede generalizations about literary forms. Fowler criticizes that Wittgenstein focuses on “directly exhibited resemblances” and suggests instead focusing on the traditional links between literary works: “What produces generic resemblances, reflection soon shows, is tradition: a sequence of influence and imitation and inherited codes connecting works in a genre. As kinship makes a family, so literary relations of this sort form a genre” (Fowler 1982, 42Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). Here Fowler clearly addresses the conventional level of genres. Traditional references between the works are a prerequisite to treating them as members of a family, which limits the possibilities of the network to cover just everything. However, it also means that the conventional genre precedes literary text types. Comparing Fowler’s concept to Fricke’s definition of genre, the level of convention is not dependent on the textual level but the other way around. Still, it is not entirely clear how Fowler delimits a common tradition (and a common generic convention) because he cautions:
In its modified form, the theory of family resemblance also suggests that we should be on the lookout for unexhibited, unobvious, underlying connections between the features (and the works) of a genre. As with heredity, with generic tradition too we have to expect quite unconscious processes to be at work, besides those that readers are aware of. It would be strange if genre did not in part operate unconsciously, like other coding systems within language and literature. (Fowler 1982, 43Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.)
120His remark on the possibility of unconscious processes that lead to shared features and resemblances between works again points to the textual level because conventional markers of genre are unlikely to be unexhibited. So the common literary tradition must be understood in a wide sense, for example, as a common temporal, geographical, or cultural context. Usefully the common literary tradition can also be understood as a common major genre in which the works that are part of the family network participate, but then the traditional links are quite loose again.
121By analyzing literary works in such a broad frame of common tradition, for instance, by building a corpus that represents it and categorizing the texts based on textual features, digital genre stylistics can contribute to uncovering the underlying connections between the texts. In order to formalize the family resemblance concept, this needs to be done not by presupposing necessary common features or feature values and distributions that are similar for all the texts in a group at once but by allowing indirect and overlapping similarities. This is possible with network analysis. A proposal for such a textual “family resemblance analysis” is made in chapter 4.2.2.2, where it is applied to subgenres of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels. The families are subgroups in the entire network, and they can be delimited because some regions in the network are interconnected more closely than others. With that, it is possible to define literary text types based on family resemblance relationships. These text types can be related to conventional literary genres so that non-classificatory textual genres become definable. The recourse to stylistic networks as an alternative method for category building solves several problems:
122Using the family resemblance concept not only as an abstract counterpart to logical classification but also to formalize it can help enhancing its reputation in literary genre theory. It has been criticized there for being a handy slogan and also because the boundaries between different categories are not defined sharply.85 Fishelov, for example, describes the takeover of the family resemblance concept by genre theorists as the attempt to find a philosophical foundation for “the dominant trend in modern critical theory, with its stress on the flexible and dynamic nature of literary genres” (Fishelov 1993, 54Fishelov, David. 1993. Metaphors of genre: the role of analogies in genre theory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.). He criticizes the concept as too open because it cannot explain readers’ relatively high consensus about boundaries between different genres. Subsequently, Fishelov again looks for necessary conditions for differentiating genres that others have described in terms of the family resemblance notion, such as the tragedy or the novel (Fishelov 1993, 55–68Fishelov, David. 1993. Metaphors of genre: the role of analogies in genre theory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.).86 Fricke instead proposes to use combinations of necessary and optional features in “flexible” genre definitions. These should overcome both the definitions of genres as combinations of necessary features, which he sees as too rigid to capture historical change, and definitions in terms of family resemblances, which in his opinion, are too loose. Instead, he proposes structures such as, for example, “[1] + [2] + [3] + [4a u/o 4b] + [5a u/o 5b u/o 5c]” (Fricke 2010, 9Fricke, Harald. 2010. “Definitionen und Begriffsformen.” In Handbuch Gattungstheorie, edited by Rüdiger Zymner, 7–10. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler.) for the definition of the anecdote, meaning that the first three features are necessary, plus at least one of the variants of the features 4 and 5, respectively. So Fricke also goes back to necessary features but complements them with additional sufficient or “alternative necessary” features.
123Nonetheless, Hempfer emphasizes the potential value of both the prototype categories and the family resemblance networks for genre theory: “I believe that genre theory within literary studies can, on the basis of the concepts of family resemblance and prototypes, manage to realign key questions, especially those arising from the polysemy and historicity of genre concepts” (Hempfer 2014, 414Hempfer, Klaus W. 2014. “Some Aspects of a Theory of Genre.” In Linguistics and Literary Studies/Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers/Begegnungen, Interferenzen und Kooperationen, edited by Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob, 405–422. Berlin: De Gruyter.).87 This optimistic line is followed here. To start with, all three concepts of genres as categories – genres as logical classes, prototype categories, and family resemblance networks – are seen as heuristic tools that can be employed in digital stylistic analyses of genre. They can be used to look for literary text types and their connections to and overlaps with conventional genres in the form of textual genres. In the previous chapter on the system and history of genres, the issue was raised about where to draw a line between different literary text types and different textual genres in relationship to conventional genres. This question can have different answers depending on the chosen categorization method.
124With a classificatory approach, text types and textual genres will be more closely attached to the conventional genre expressed by the genre labels so that some internal variation in the category might be covered. With unsupervised clustering, the expectation is that if the number of clusters is optimized and not fixed beforehand, there will be more text types than conventional genres. The text types are expected to represent the genre-internal or cross-genre textual variation more closely but are more distant from conventional genre groupings. The same is assumed for a family resemblance network analysis, only that this approach is even more flexible in allowing for partial similarities, which might lead to text types that can be related to conventional genres in a more meaningful way. However, these assumptions need to be checked and substantiated by empirical work to determine which of the concepts suits which historical genres best on the textual level. Even if it is expected that the more open concepts of prototypes and family resemblances are, in general, better suited to describe the internal structure and variability of historical, literary text types, classification has its value. It can help to find a good feature basis by which the text types can be linked to conventional genres and use that basis as a starting point for the more open procedures. Classification (see chapter 4.2.2.1) and a family resemblance network analysis (chapter 4.2.2.2) are employed in the empirical part of this study to analyze the subgenres of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels.
125All the three techniques that were proposed here as possible implementations of the three genre category concepts – statistical classification, clustering, and network analysis – have been employed in digital genre stylistics. Even other, non-categorizing approaches, for example, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), are common to explore how literary texts appear as groups in features spaces.88 Even so, the relationship between these methods and the literary theoretical considerations about genre categories has not been analyzed much yet. Thoughts about prototypicality, the historical variability, and social embedding of literary genres have been expressed and connected to statistical text analysis,89 but the family resemblance concept, for example, has not been explicitly formalized in digital genre stylistics so far. It is important to link key discussions of literary genre theory to digital genre stylistics so that research results of the two areas are confronted more deeply. This can increase the interest of the two disciplines in each other and also challenge the findings achieved in both of them. As with the definitions of text types and genres, also the concepts of genre categorization and the possibilities for their implementation are crucial points of contact between literary genre theory and digital genre stylistics.
126The textual features employed in this investigation are subsumed under the concept of literary style. Similarly to the genre concept, the definition of style varies from one humanities discipline to the other. The subject also has a long tradition within single disciplines where it is still debated.90 Herrmann, Schöch, and van Dalen-Oskam (2015Herrmann, J. Berenike, Christof Schöch, and Karina van Dalen-Oskam. 2015. “Revisiting Style, a Key Concept in Literary Studies.” Journal of Literary Theory 9 (1): 25–52. https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2015-0003.), who trace the development of the notion of style in the German, French, and Dutch literary and linguistic tradition since 1945, note six types of definitions of style that re-appear in most approaches to the concept:
style as(Herrmann, Schöch, and van Dalen-Oskam 2015, 30Herrmann, J. Berenike, Christof Schöch, and Karina van Dalen-Oskam. 2015. “Revisiting Style, a Key Concept in Literary Studies.” Journal of Literary Theory 9 (1): 25–52. https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2015-0003.)91
- constituting a higher-order artistic value (assessed through aesthetic experience),
- a holistic gestalt of single texts,
- an expression of individuality, subjectivity and/or emotional attitude of an author or speaker,
- an artifact that presupposes (hypothetical or factual) selection/choice among a set of (more or less synonymous) alternatives,
- a deviation from some type of norm, involving (quantitative or cognitive) contrast,
- any property of a text that can be measured computationally.
127Especially the last two of these definitions are relevant for corpus-based computational genre stylistics. The notion of contrast is decisive because the usual procedure to delimit genres as text categories is to compare texts associated with the genre one is interested in with texts that participate in other genres on a similar level (for example, the level of thematic subgenres). Another possibility is to compare texts of one genre with texts that are part of a more general generic context enclosing the genre of interest (for example, comparing crime novels to a set of other novels). The style of the genre or subgenre in question is always defined relative to other elements in a corpus. Suppose the whole literary production covered by the broader context of the corpus is considered representative of a general norm. In that case, the style of a genre can be captured as a subnorm, which deviates from the general one, or as a norm that contrasts with other subnorms. Regarding the relationship between text style and genre, the norm is understood as the set of normative facts that can be extracted from the texts. These are traces of and represent the conventional and communicative norms of genres. The last notion of style that Herrmann et al. list provides the basis for the kind of style and the kind of normative facts that can be identified in the texts: any property that can be measured with computational means. The target property can be, for example, author style, genre style, or the style of a certain literary period. If it can be measured, it must be possible to capture it through the linguistic surface of the texts. This can be done either directly, when specific words, characters, or syntactic constructions are counted, or indirectly, for example, when textual cues are interpreted in terms of higher order features such as topics, which in turn are interpreted as elements of the target style. Text structure that is interpretable from the surface can also be subsumed under the idea of computationally tractable text elements that can serve to define a target style. This would include, for instance, chapters, headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, typographically marked quotes, or passages of direct speech. The computational treatment of such structures can be facilitated through textual markup. From a computational perspective, metadata that summarizes textual aspects is, in the first place, not considered part of the text stylistic features. For instance, if the narrative perspective of a text is captured in a metadata item as the result of a close reading process or based on external literary-historical information, this textual aspect would only be linked to style if it also can be induced from specific textual surface features. The target level of style (author, genre, period, etc.) is usually settled on an extra-textual level of the wider communicative context of the texts. Then again, author styles, genre styles, and the styles of periods can be recognized in texts, which means that such influencing factors can be assumed to be tractable in the texts through consciously used text properties as well as unconsciously left linguistic marks.
128In the context of genre, Schaeffer differentiates between three kinds of text properties. In his terms, “generic indexes” are signals that are mainly found in paratexts of the works or the literary context and whose function is metatextual and demonstrative (for example, the label “novela de costumbres”). “Generic traits” are textual properties and have a structural and non-demonstrative function (for instance, verse structure in sonnets). “Generic markers” are textual traces of factors that are part of the communicative level and exemplify an intentional property (such a factor would, for example, be a satiric attitude) (Schaeffer 1983, 174–175Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1983. Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? Paris: Seuil.). Transferred to the idea of text style, traits can be understood as general text structural properties and stylistic markers as surface cues that can be linked to pragmatic properties. Stylistic indexes can be conceived as stylistic features of the conventional level, which influence the perception of style but are not necessarily congruent with certain traits or markers. A conventional genre label would, for example, be an index for a certain genre style. In his set of terms, Schaeffer brings in different communicative levels: the “structural” level, by which he probably means the syntactic and semantic textual level versus the pragmatic level. He uses the terms to distinguish between properties that are somehow inherent and constitutive of texts (the traits) and others that are present as traces of communicative functions of the texts (the markers). However, he does not differentiate between the linguistic surface level and higher-order textual characteristics, at least not explicitly. This means that a structural-semantic text property, such as a certain number of characters in a dramatic play, could be called a trait in the same way as the use of certain types of nouns, for example, a scientific vocabulary in a naturalistic novel. For a computational analysis concerned with stylistic properties, such a distinction would be useful to differentiate between properties of texts in general and properties of text style. Furthermore, on the linguistic surface, everything is the same. It is difficult to explain or decide which features are due to the conscious structuring and design of texts and which ones are unconsciously employed or stemming from pragmatic intentions or other text-external factors. Because of these difficulties in describing text style, Schaeffer’s distinction between traits and markers is not directly employed here.
129A terminology that covers similar aspects of describing the connection between textual patterns and literary theoretical or conventional conceptions of genres has been proposed by Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze:
The traditional literature on genre is rich with classificatory schemes and systems, some of which might in retrospect be analyzed as simple attribute systems. [...] We will refer here to the attributes used in classifying genres as GENERIC FACETS. A facet is simply a property which distinguishes a class of texts that answers to certain practical interests, and which is moreover associated with a characteristic set of computable structural or linguistic properties, whether categorical or statistical, which we will describe as ‘generic cues.’ In principle, a given text can be described in terms of an indefinitely large number of facets. For example, a newspaper story about a Balkan peace initiative is an example of a BROADCAST as opposed to DIRECTED communication, a property that correlates formally with certain uses of the pronoun you. It is also an example of a NARRATIVE, as opposed to a DIRECTIVE (e.g., in a manual), SUASIVE (as in an editorial), or DESCRIPTIVE (as in a market survey) communication: and this facet correlates, among other things, with a high incidence of preterite verb forms. (Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze 1997, 33Kessler, Brett, Geoffrey Numberg, and Hinrich Schütze. 1997. “Automatic detection of text genre.” In ACL '98/EACL '98: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Eighth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 32–38. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics. http://dx.doi.org/10.3115/976909.979622.)
130Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze differentiate between generic facets and generic cues. They use the first term to refer to higher-order attributes that are used to distinguish texts of a certain class from those belonging to a different class. If one interprets the examples that Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze give, one concludes that they understand facets as applying to the text as a whole and not to specific parts of it. Furthermore, the facets that Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze mention are themselves functional linguistic text types (“broadcast” versus “directed communication”; “narrative”, “directive”, “suasive”, “descriptive”) or, from the point of view of literary genre, modes which are understood as attributes of genres (“newspaper story”). Facets are characteristics that are not to be equated with specific linguistic traits of the text but are connected to them. The latter are the generic cues. The authors assume that generic facets are computationally and linguistically tractable through their cues. The advantage of Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze’s terminology for a text stylistic analysis is that they provide an own term for features of the structural-linguistic surface. Their term “cues” will also be employed here to designate low-level stylistic features. The meaning of the term “facets”, though, should be described in a more differentiated and comprehensive manner. Here it is preferred to call the examples that Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze give (narrative, directive, descriptive) either functional text types – from the linguistic point of view – or modes – from the point of view of literary genre theory. The term “facets” can include these if they are meant as pragmatic textual properties of genres, but there can also be other types of facets. At the beginning of their article, Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze describe facets as “attributes used in classifying genres” (Kessler, Numberg, and Schütze 1997, 33Kessler, Brett, Geoffrey Numberg, and Hinrich Schütze. 1997. “Automatic detection of text genre.” In ACL '98/EACL '98: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Eighth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 32–38. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics. http://dx.doi.org/10.3115/976909.979622.) and these can, in principle, be of any type. Returning to the examples of the number of characters in a dramatic play or the use of scientific vocabulary in a naturalistic novel, these two aspects can both be understood as facets if they are attributes that are ascribed to genre categories and if they can be linked to surface cues. However, “the use of scientific vocabulary” can commonly be considered an element of style, and there is a direct relationship of this facet to cues (the specific words that are part of scientific vocabulary). In contrast, the facet “a high number of characters in a comedy” would commonly not be treated as style and is much further away from surface cues (it would need to be mapped to mentions of character names and the use of personal pronouns, for instance). To give another example, the narrative perspective of a text, for instance, can be perceived as part of a text’s style but is also primarily situated on a pragmatic level: it is signaled that the whole narrative text or major parts of it are designed to be narrated in a certain perspective. This has effects on the syntagmatic realization of the text, for instance, the use of pronouns and verb forms in a certain person in the narrated text. Therefore, the relationship of the “narrative perspective” facet to surface cues is also more mediated than in the case of “the use of scientific vocabulary”. Here, facets are considered as attributes of the target category of style (e.g., genre, author, period, etc.) but not themselves elements of style. The term “stylistic traits” is introduced to designate elements of style that can be more abstract than surface cues but are still attributes of how the text is represented syntagmatically (that is, structurally, linguistically, syntactically, and by surface semantics). A certain narrative perspective can then be conceived as a facet when it is used to characterize a genre or some other category and as a stylistic trait that can be linked to stylistic cues. A high number of characters in a comedy can also be a facet, but it is not considered a stylistic trait. However, if it can be linked to stylistic cues, it can influence style. A high number of character mentions in a comedy, in contrast, can be a stylistic trait because it is situated on the level of the linguistic representation of the text. In the following, the terms “facet”, “stylistic trait”, and “stylistic cue” are used here.
131At the end of their article, Herrmann, Schöch, and van Dalen-Oskam formulate a broad definition of style, aiming to provide a generally useful concept for computational, quantitative, and empirical studies of style in literary texts: “Style is a property of texts constituted by an ensemble of formal features which can be observed quantitatively or qualitatively” (Herrmann, Schöch, and van Dalen-Oskam 2015, 44Herrmann, J. Berenike, Christof Schöch, and Karina van Dalen-Oskam. 2015. “Revisiting Style, a Key Concept in Literary Studies.” Journal of Literary Theory 9 (1): 25–52. https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2015-0003.). Here, the definition is narrowed down a bit and also differentiated and elaborated for the purpose of computational and quantitative stylistic genre analysis:
132Being less general, the definition directly addresses literary genre style and defines it in terms of the textual genre as the intersection of text type and conventional genre. Furthermore, feature values and distributions are added to make clear that presence or absence is not the only possible form of features and also that specific feature combinations can be decisive. That the ensemble of features should be distinctive means that it can be used to distinguish between different genre categories on the textual level. To be able to speak about the style of a certain literary genre, it is required that there is considerable overlap between the corresponding text type and conventional genre. This is formulated vaguely as “widely”, so that the necessary degree of intersection needs to be discussed in each case. Nevertheless, an overlap of more than 50 % can be taken as a minimum. For the features, a difference is made between formal, low-level stylistic cues and higher-level stylistic traits to make clear that there can be different degrees of abstraction from the textual surface. Linguistic low-level features (stylistic cues) are, for example, the number of pronouns, n-grams, or collocations of a specific type. A linguistic higher-order feature (stylistic trait) is, for instance, the number of descriptive or argumentative passages in a text. For the stylistic traits, a link to the stylistic cues must be established to make sure that they are observable and computationally measurable. Typical literary features can also correspond to cues, for example, rhyme structures or other rhetoric means. However, it is more common for literary features to be defined on a higher level, stylistic or non-stylistic (for instance, narrative perspective, character constellations, or plot elements).92 For the higher-order features, it is not easy to draw a strict line between features that can still be considered (indirectly) observable and those that are mainly interpretable. In this respect, too, it will be necessary in each case to discuss the nature of the features: if they are stylistic traits or not and if they can be linked to stylistic cues or not. Finally, the third part of the definition splits the concept of literary genre style into a wide one, including all kinds of linguistic cues, and a narrower one excluding semantic cues. This distinction is made to be able to characterize features more precisely as being primarily structural and functional or as being related to the content of the texts as well. To what extent can semantic cues be understood as elements of a text’s style? The concept of style would be overstretched considerably if elements of the content of a literary text, such as the type and number of characters involved, the basic theme, setting, or the underlying sequence of events of the story, would directly be declared stylistic features. In the first place, these are considered textual facets here that can be part of genre definitions. However, if such elements are assessed and described as they occur on the textual surface (via stylistic traits or directly linked to stylistic cues), it seems legitimate to include them in a broad definition of formal textual style because the same story involving the same content-related elements can be told differently. It may vary, for example, how often the characters are mentioned explicitly by their name or through which textual topics or motives the theme of a text is expressed. One may decide to include such elements in using a wide concept of style or to exclude them by adhering to a narrower style definition.
133Some observations can be made concerning the relationship of the style definition to different types of categorization. Following the class concept, the above definition of literary genre style entails that a clear line can be drawn between one group of texts and others based on how an ensemble of formal features is constituted in these texts. In the prototype setup, the genre style would be defined based on a prototypical constitution of an ensemble of formal features. The other texts belonging to the same or to other textual genres would be situated relatively to this central feature constitution. From a family resemblance perspective, genre style can be understood as a set of related ensembles of formal features linked via parts of the various feature ensembles.
134The empirical part of this study is concerned with creating a bibliography and a corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels to analyze subgenres of those novels on the level of metadata and text. The empirical work and findings are presented in chapter 3, where the bibliography and corpus are described, and in chapter 4, which contains the metadata and text analysis of the novels and their subgenres. Novels from three countries, Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico, were selected for the analysis, and diachronically, the bibliography and the corpus are limited to 1830–1910. Both the literary-historical developments of the time and the historical, political, and geographical context are discussed in the corpus chapter, where the choice of the countries and the time period are explained. In addition, the general defining characteristics of the novels in question and the assignments of subgenre labels to the novels are laid out in the empirical part.
135The current chapter presents a selection of major subgenres of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels as they are defined, described and discussed in literary-historical research, independently of and preceding the findings of the text analysis conducted in the present study.93 First, three thematic subgenres are treated: the historical novel (novela histórica), the novel of manners or customs (novela de costumbres), and the sentimental novel (novela sentimental). Subsequently, three subgenres related to literary currents are introduced: the romantic novel (novela romántica), the realist novel (novela realista), and the naturalistic novel (novela naturalista). As argued before, literary currents can be described as conventional literary genres, as well, and potentially even as textual literary genres.94 Of course, these are not the only subgenres of Spanish-American novels in the nineteenth century, and the metadata analysis of the corpus and bibliography shows a great variety of them. However, they are the most important ones on the two discursive levels of theme and literary current from a quantitative perspective and have therefore been chosen for text analysis. Furthermore, they have repeatedly been treated in literary histories and other literary-historical research about nineteenth-century Spanish-American literature, which is not the case for all the other different subgenres of the novel found in the database that was created for this study. The correlation between their quantitative importance and the critical interest in them is probably not accidental.
136As the chosen subgenres also existed and exist outside of the Spanish-American tradition, especially in the European countries, there is a wealth of research literature on each one of them. It cannot be taken into consideration in its entirety, so the presentation of the subgenres concentrates on the three chosen countries. General histories of Latin- and Spanish-American literature and novels are also taken into account but primarily for general statements about the subgenres in question and not to analyze them for all the countries of the region. There are monographs on some of the subgenres that are specialized in the nineteenth century and either cover Spanish America as a whole or one of the three countries Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico. Most of them are concerned with the literary currents.95 Of the thematic subgenres, the historical novel has been the focus of literary-historical work. However, no monographic studies could be found for the novela de costumbres and the novela sentimental in Spanish America in the nineteenth century.96
137For each subgenre, it is analyzed whether or not its literary-historical characterization allows to formulate hypotheses about its textual coherence, that is, whether or not it can be expected that the novels participating in the subgenre are held together on a conventional and textual level, and if so, which textual characteristics are significant. On the other side, it is also possible that the literary-historical knowledge about a subgenre suggests that textual subgroups or textual heterogeneity can be expected. Yet another possiblity is that the literary-historical accounts may not be suitable for formulating such hypotheses at all for some of the subgenres. In case they can be developed, the hypotheses about the relationships between the subgenres’ conventional and textual aspects are considered when the novels are analyzed in chapter 4.2. Before the individual subgenres are discussed, some general considerations about the novel as a genre and the Spanish-American nineteenth-century novel are made.
138Novels, in general, can hardly be defined uniquely and in formal terms. Necessary formal conditions are not sufficient to distinguish novels from other fictional narrative prose texts of considerable length, nor can additional formal or content-related criteria serve to capture all types of novels (Fludernik 2009, 627Fludernik, Monika. 2009. “Roman.” In Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen, edited by Dieter Lamping and Sandra Poppe, 627–645. Stuttgart: Kröner.; Hempfer 2014, 410Hempfer, Klaus W. 2014. “Some Aspects of a Theory of Genre.” In Linguistics and Literary Studies/Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers/Begegnungen, Interferenzen und Kooperationen, edited by Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob, 405–422. Berlin: De Gruyter.). Fowler summarizes the status of the novel as a genre (or historical kind, in his terms):
A genre so comprehensive can have but a weak unitary force. Indeed the novel has largely ceased to function as a kind in the ordinary way. Its minimal specification has even been stated as ‘an extended piece of prose fiction’—a specification in which external form appears, but only as ‘extended’ and ‘prose.’ Within this enormous field, the novel in a stronger sense—the verisimilar novel of Austen and Thackeray, which many would consider the central tradition—is now only one of several equipollent forms. (Fowler 1982, 118Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.)
139The difficulties in defining the novel formally are also present in the case of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels. There are some early narrative prose texts that were written in the colonial era and can be considered forerunners of the novel in Spanish America. However, the genre only took off considerably during the nineteenth century (Gálvez 1990, 15–25Gálvez, Marina. 1990. La novela hispanoamericana (hasta 1940). Madrid: Taurus.; Lindstrom 2004Lindstrom, Naomi. 2004. Early Spanish American Narrative. Austin: University of Texas Press.). So especially in the early decades of the century, the Spanish-American novel is characterized by literary experimentation, for instance, by fluctuations between very short prose forms that are close to stories and excessively long serial novels published in newspapers. Besides the varying length of the texts, their status as fictional works is marginal in some cases as well. Up to the end of the century, many novels served the need to document and discuss contemporary or past political and historical events, sometimes in the form of “memories” or as concealed social critique, and the novel had an important function in the process of nation building after the wars of independence. This aspect is particularly relevant for Argentina and Mexico, but even in the Cuban case, the novels already served identity functions in the colony’s last decades. Because of the closeness of many works to non-fictional discourses, the early Spanish-American novels are special, and in some cases, it is difficult to draw a line between fictional and non-fictional texts.97
140Nonetheless, many novels were published in Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico in the nineteenth century, and their number increased considerably, especially after 1880.98 Even before, there were more novels than the few ones usually cited as representative of the nineteenth century in literary histories. Molina, for example, analyses the early Argentine novel between 1838 and 1872 and finds that the novels “popped up like mushrooms” (her book having the title “como crecen los hongos”, referring to the commentary that an Argentina journalist made in 1860 about the increasing number of novels that were published). She analyzes 86 novels for a period considered unproductive for the Argentine novel (Molina 2011, 13–17Molina, Hebe Beatriz. 2011. Como crecen los hongos. La novela argentina entre 1838 y 1872. Buenos Aires: Teseo.).
141Even though the novel was a genre that was relatively new as a broad phenomenon, there were specific types of subgenres that were practiced by the Spanish-American writers. For one thing, early Spanish-American novels were influenced by European models, including types of romantic novels such as sentimental novels and historical novels. At the same time, the subgenres were varied to serve the needs of expression in the Spanish-American context in a better way.99 To analyze these subgenres quantitatively and examine to what extent and in what way the genre labels used by writers and publishers and the ones assigned to the works by literary scholars actually correspond to distinguishable text types is thus of interest from several perspectives.
142If the novel itself is so manifold and difficult to define, how about its subgenres? Fowler concludes that “the novel is still a kind, even if one badly in need of subdivision” (Fowler 1982, 120Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). The novel is rooted in many other earlier fictional and non-fictional genres, such as epic, romance, history, or letter, which influence its more mature forms, “giving rise in some instances to distinct subgenres” (Fowler 1982, 120Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). So it may be the case that some of the novel’s subgenres are textually more coherent than the novel itself is on a general level. On the other side, subgenres of the novel can be specified from a whole range of perspectives, which makes them “extremely volatile. To determine the features of a subgenre is to trace a diachronic process of imitation, variation, innovation—in fact, to verge on source study” (Fowler 1982, 114Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). It is thus an open question whether Spanish-American nineteenth-century novels can be easily separated into textual classes corresponding to their conventional subgenres or whether they resist such classification. The mentioned characteristics of the novel in general and of the early Spanish-American novels, in particular, suggest that at least for some of the subgenres, alternative categorization approaches such as the family resemblance analysis can be helpful to examine where the levels of genre convention, text types, and textual genres diverge.100 In the next two chapters on thematic subgenres and subgenres related to literary currents, the subgenres that were chosen on each of these two levels are presented to provide background information for the text analysis that is conducted in chapter 4.2.
143Characteristical of the historical novel is the crossing-over of fiction and history. Historical events, places, persons, and conditions of a past epoch are represented and arranged narratively (Álamo Felices 2011, 84Álamo Felices, Francisco. 2011. Los subgéneros novelescos. Teoría y modalidades narrativas. Almería: Universidad Almería.). While factual history aims to reconstruct a past period by identifying and recording significant personalities and events and by tracing the development of social institutions, historical novels serve to revitalize historical characters and the world they lived in (Read 1939, ixRead, John Lloyd. 1939. The Mexican Historical Novel. 1826–1910. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos.). As a literary subgenre, the historical novel gained considerable popularity during the nineteenth century through the novels of Walter Scott, also in the sphere of the Romance languages and cultures and in the Spanish-American countries (Dill 1999, 131Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.; Janik 2008, 64–67Janik, Dieter. 2008. Hispanoamerikanische Literaturen. Von der Unabhängigkeit bis zu den Avantgarden (1810–1930). Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.; Lefere 2013, 17Lefere, Robin. 2013. La novela histórica: (re)definición, caracterización, tipología. Madrid: Visor Libros.; Maxwell 2009Maxwell, Richard. 2009. The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). However, in the Spanish tradition, historical fiction also has remote origins in the historical narratives of the Spanish conquests in the Americas (Read 1939, 1–28Read, John Lloyd. 1939. The Mexican Historical Novel. 1826–1910. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos.). In general, several characteristics have been pointed out to be constitutive of the historical novel (Fernández Prieto 1996Fernández Prieto, Celia. 1996. “Poética de la novela histórica como género literario.” Signa. Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica 5: 185–202. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmc7p9c7.; Lefere 2013, 17–62Lefere, Robin. 2013. La novela histórica: (re)definición, caracterización, tipología. Madrid: Visor Libros.; Spang 1998Spang, Kurt. 1998. “Apuntes para una definición de la novela histórica.” In La novela histórica. Teoría y comentarios., edited by Kurt Spang, Ignacio Arellano, and Carlos Mata, 63–125. 2nd ed. Pamplona: EUNSA. https://web.archive.org/web/20160504022949/http://www.culturahistorica.es/spang/novela_historica.pdf.):
144According to the bibliographical data that was collected for this study, the historical novel was the most frequent thematic subgenre in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, many historical novels were explicitly marked as such in series or subtitles, which shows that the subgenre was well established on a conventional level.101 In the Spanish-American historical novels, typical topics are the period of conquest, the colonial era, and the wars of independence. Especially the latter are not part of a remote historical past, but in the case of Mexico and Argentina, they took place in the early nineteenth century itself, and for Cuba towards the end of the century. In some historical novels published in Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico, a European setting is chosen, for example, from Antiquity or the Middle Ages, but most are concerned with local history, which is temporally more immediate. This makes the Spanish-American historical novels special with regard to the first general defining aspect of temporal distance because that distance is not given in some cases. However, the novels are often explicitly declared historical, even if the events are contemporary or took place in a very recent past. Even if the more distant past of the conquest or colonial period is treated, this is done differently than in European historical novels: “Scott, for instance, tried to escape from his century and return to a spirit of the past; Mexican historical novelists who dealt with the distant past attempted to interpret that past in terms of their own nineteenth-century [liberal] thought” (Read 1939, 58Read, John Lloyd. 1939. The Mexican Historical Novel. 1826–1910. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos.). Nevertheless, nineteenth-century Spanish-American historical novels can be divided into two groups: romantic historical novels dealing with the conquest and colonial times on the one side and the ones dealing with contemporary historical events on the other (ixRead, John Lloyd. 1939. The Mexican Historical Novel. 1826–1910. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos.). Read calls the latter “novels of contemporary history” (xRead, John Lloyd. 1939. The Mexican Historical Novel. 1826–1910. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos.) and Molina “prospectively historical novels” (“novelas prospectivamente históricas”, Molina 2011, 285–312Molina, Hebe Beatriz. 2011. Como crecen los hongos. La novela argentina entre 1838 y 1872. Buenos Aires: Teseo.).
145Another typical element of romantic historical novels is a sentimental plot. The most prominent example is the novel “Amalia” (1851–1855) by the Argentine José Mármol, which tells the story of a group of resistance fighters against the dictatorship of Rosas102 and of the protagonist’s tragic love relationship (Dill 1999, 127Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.). As Dill states: “Amputierte man den genannten Romantypen [politischer Roman und historischer Roman] ihre politisch-sozialen Teile, würde der private Part samt Gefühlswelt der bürgerlichen Protagonistinnen, d. h. der sentimentale Roman, übrigbleiben” (Dill 1999, 138Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.). However, the historical novel was not only present in the romantic period. It continued to be practiced towards the end of the nineteenth century and also in the twentieth century. It was, for example, influenced by Spanish realist and French naturalistic authors. The Mexican novel “Los bandidos de Río Frío” (1892) which was written by Manuel Payno, for instance, carries the subtitle “Novela naturalista, humorística, de costumbres, de crímenes y de horrores”. That it has been classified as a historical novel despite five other explicit subgenre labels in its subtitle marks it as one of the cases with a clear discrepancy between the generic convention, the textual form, and the critical tradition that the works have been seen in.103 Another example of realist historical novels are the works belonging to the series “Episodios Nacionales Mexicanos” (1903) authored by the Mexican Victoriano Salado Álvarez (Fernández-Arias Campoamor 1952, 84–85 Fernández-Arias Campoamor, José. 1952. Novelistas de Mejico: esquema de la historia de la novela mejicana (de Lizardi al 1950). Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica. ; Read 1939, 293–303Read, John Lloyd. 1939. The Mexican Historical Novel. 1826–1910. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos.). Read characterizes them as follows:
In the collection of material for his work Salado Álvarez exhausted accessible periodicals of the period, and gleaned carefully the memoirs of acquaintances and little known books and documents, in search of human aspects of the period and its chief characters, attempting to bring to light fresh information instead of revamping the threadbare stories that constituted the patriotic equipment of various partisan groups and that had been the chief source of of such writers as [the late romantic author] Juan A. Mateos. (Read 1939, 295Read, John Lloyd. 1939. The Mexican Historical Novel. 1826–1910. New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos.)
146In sum, several aspects can be noted regarding the expected textual coherence of nineteenth-century Spanish-American historical novels. First, the subgenre is long-lasting, there are numerous works attributed to it and it was recognized as a subgenre by contemporaries. These factors suggest that the subgenre is also stylistically distinguishable from other subgenres. What might make its textual classification difficult, though, is that it is often mixed with a sentimental plot and thus has characteristics in common with the sentimental novels, as well. Furthermore, the novels of contemporary history treat similar political and social subjects to other types of novels that are not designed and communicated as historical ones. In addition, stylistic differences can be expected between the early romantic versus the later realist and naturalistic historical novels. Moreover, the range of different special topics (conquest, colonial era, wars of independence) might lead to a subdivision of the textual genre into several subtypes, at least if semantic features are used to categorize the texts.
147The novelas de costumbres (also called costumbrista novels, novels of customs, or novels of manners) derived from short pieces of prose, the so-called “cuadros de costumbres”, which had a French origin and were very popular in Spain before they reached Spanish America.104 These prose texts were mainly published in journals and periodicals. In them, life in urban or rural settings is described, and the male and female types of different social strata are portrayed with their habits. Furthermore, traditional festivities are a common topic in the texts. The cuadros evolved to full novels retaining the same characteristics. Observing the particular, the traditional, and the vernacular were important concerns of the novels of customs. They were, therefore, well suited to take up elements of the Spanish-American reality of life and contribute to the development of a national novel. Stylistically, they are characterized as creating a local color, for instance, by including colloquial speech and creating a picturesque effect, which links them to picaresque novels. Moreover, a humorous or critical-ironic attitude is typical for the novels of customs in their romantic form. In Spanish America, they were also used as a vehicle for political purposes (Janik 2008, 60–64Janik, Dieter. 2008. Hispanoamerikanische Literaturen. Von der Unabhängigkeit bis zu den Avantgarden (1810–1930). Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.).
148As in the case of the historical novels, also the novels of customs were often explicitly designated as “novelas de costumbres”.105 The label was used by convention but also with specific, explicitly formulated purposes. The Mexican author José Tomás de Cuéllar, for example, was a prolific writer of novels of customs. He produced a whole series called “La linterna mágica” (published between 1871 and 1892). The first novel of the series is preceded by an introduction explaining Cuéllar’s literary program. The magical lantern is a symbol for the purpose of the novels of customs. Cuéllar claims that he first happened upon the expression in a small corner shop of some Mexican village. This is already indicative of the aim to represent local and rural customs. The lantern illuminates all kinds of spots the author visits, showing the multitude of ordinary people he wants to portray. It enlarges the view on vices and defects and, at the same time, minimizes the size of each person so that they come to the fore above all as social groups. The reader is invited to follow the lantern’s light which accepts the insufficiencies of the people with humor and also presents alternative models of virtue (Cuéllar 1890, xii–xCuéllar, José Tomás de. 1890. “Prólogo.” In Ensalada de pollos. Novela de estos tiempos que corren (1871) tomada del carnet de Facundo (José T. de Cuéllar). Vol. 1 of La linterna mágica. Segunda época. Barcelona: Tipo-Litografía de Hermenegildo Miralles. http://web.archive.org/web/20230128094558/http://cdigital.dgb.uanl.mx/la/1080046422_C/1080046436_T2/1080046436_01.pdf.). The consciousness and the frequency with which the term “novela de costumbres” was employed show the strength of the historical generic convention. However, the novels of customs are not detached from other prominent thematic subgenres. Novels can be at the same time historical and of customs, as for example “Calvario y Tabor. Novela histórica y de costumbres” (1868, MX) by Vicente Riva Palacio or “Julia” (1868, MX) by Manuel Martínez de Castro, which had the subtitle “novela de costumbres mexicanas” in the first edition and “novela histórica y de costumbres” in the second one. There is also a close relationship between novels of customs and sentimental novels, as Janik points out:
Die literarische Darstellung von Natur, Landschaft, landwirtschaftlicher Arbeit, von Gutshäusern und Gutsverwaltung, ebenso von städtischem Leben und städtischen Sitten sollte die gekannte Wirklichkeit ansichtig machen, doch eingebunden in eine tragende Handlungsstruktur. [...] Die Hauptaufgabe, die sich jedem Autor stellte, war die erzählerische Entwicklung eines komplexen Geschehens mit dramatischen Peripetien. Im Gefolge der genannten französischen Autoren [Balzac und Stendhal] und ihrer ‘romantischen’ Wegbegleiter (Rousseau und Chateaubriand) bildet in einer ganzen Reihe von Werken die Entstehung einer tiefen existentiellen Liebesbindung [...] die Grundstruktur. (Janik 2008, 67–68Janik, Dieter. 2008. Hispanoamerikanische Literaturen. Von der Unabhängigkeit bis zu den Avantgarden (1810–1930). Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.)
149A prominent example of such a combination of the novela de costumbres and the sentimental novel is the Cuban work “Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel” (1839/1882) by Cirilo Villaverde, which contains the opposing tendencies of a romantic love story and a political stance focusing on the Cuban reality in the 1830s (Janik 2008, 75–77Janik, Dieter. 2008. Hispanoamerikanische Literaturen. Von der Unabhängigkeit bis zu den Avantgarden (1810–1930). Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.). Although they form mixed types with other romantic subgenres, the novels of customs still represent early forms of realistic texts. In the later nineteenth century, they entered into similar relationships with the realist and naturalistic novels. As Kohut notes, the delimitation of Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism is difficult in Spanish America for several reasons, one of them being the Costumbrismo as an element between the different literary currents:
Zum Realismus gehört die Zuwendung zur Gesellschaft, zur Romantik die häufig idyllisierende Perspektive. [...] Wichtiger als der Costumbrismo als eigenständige literarische Richtung ist die entsprechende Einfärbung zahlreicher realistischer bzw. naturalistischer Romane. So gab der Chilene Alberto Blest Gana seinem Roman Martín Rivas (1862) den Untertitel Novela de costumbres político-sociales, der Argentinier Lucio Vicente López seinem Roman La gran aldea (1884) den Untertitel Costumbres bonarenses. (Kohut 2016, 196Kohut, Karl. 2016. Kurze Einführung in Theorie und Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur (1492–1920). Berlin: Lit Verlag.)
150Like the historical novel, also the novela de costumbres is a primarily thematic subgenre that was vital in the whole nineteenth century, although it was most popular in the Romantic period. Because one of its aims is to depict local habits realistically and faithfully, including linguistic peculiarities, there may be stylistic traits that help to distinguish this type of novel from the other thematic subgenres. However, in the literary-historical characterizations, this subgenre appears as one that enters into fusions with quite distinct other subgenres, which might make it difficult to classify it on the basis of features related to themes.
151The third thematic subgenre that was chosen for text analysis is the sentimental novel proper. Contrary to the historical novel and the novela de costumbres, sentimental novels are usually not marked with explicit subgenre labels by authors or editors. In the whole bibliography and corpus that were compiled for this study, there is just one work carrying the subtitle “novela sentimental” – the novel “El canto del cisne (Novela sentimental)” (1910, AR) by Roque C. Otamendi. From the point of view of historical genre convention, the status of sentimental novels is, therefore, different from that of historical novels and novels of customs. It was a subgenre that was signaled in more subtle ways, for example, by using female first names as titles, e.g., “Soledad” (1847, AR) by Mitre, “Esther” (1851, AR, Cané), or “Clemencia” (1869, MX) by Altamirano. Furthermore, a sentimental plot is present in the majority of the nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels, which makes this subgenre one that is part of a general generic repertoire of the time. It can appear in a pure form or as a basic element to provide a narrative structure for novels that have other, additional, or superordinate thematic objectives. It can, for example, motivate descriptions of historical and contemporary conflicts and settings. Because of the omnipresence of sentimental elements in different kinds of novels over time, the sentimental novel has also been called a “metagenre”, which might challenge the classification of novels into subgenres (Varela Jácome [1982] 2000, sec. 1.4Varela Jácome, Benito. (1982) 2000. Evolución de la novela hispanoamericana en el siglo XIX (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmct14z8.; Zó 2015, 14–16Zó, Ramiro Esteban. 2015. Emociones escriturales. La novela sentimental latinoamericana. Saarbrücken: Editorial Académica Española.).
152In pure form, the plot of a sentimental novel is centered on a highly personal conflict with exceptionally sensitive protagonists whose development of emotions is shown in the novel. Usually, the conflict is resolved in either a tragic or a happy end (Molina 2011, 375–386Molina, Hebe Beatriz. 2011. Como crecen los hongos. La novela argentina entre 1838 y 1872. Buenos Aires: Teseo.). Typical structural elements of sentimental novels are letters or passages of diaries included in the text, which give insight into personal communication and the protagonists’ mental world and sensitivities. As the historical novel, also the sentimental novel has European, especially French models that the Spanish-American authors followed, for instance, the epistolary novel “Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse” (1761, FR) by Rousseau, “René” (1802) by Chateaubriand, or the autobiographic novel “Graziella” (1852, FR) by Lamartine, but also the German epistolary novel “Die Leiden des jungen Werhers” (1774) by Goethe. In the sentimental novels proper, the protagonists are described in idealizing terms, emphasizing their moral superiority and tending to a flowery and metaphorical style. The heroine of Mitre’s novel “Soledad”, for example, is described as “imagen escapada de las telas de Rafael”, “un serafín bajado del trono del Señor”, and “la estatua de la castidad meditando”. Not only the protagonists but also the settings are described from subjective perspectives (Varela Jácome [1982] 2000, sec. 1.4Varela Jácome, Benito. (1982) 2000. Evolución de la novela hispanoamericana en el siglo XIX (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmct14z8.). The novels are often written in the first person.106 If they do not have a European setting, the action is commonly placed in the bourgeois milieu of the Creole middle or upper class and thematically focused on private life, concerned with the home, love, and family (Dill 1999, 138Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.).
153The prototypical sentimental novel should have a recognizable textual coherence, as it has its own set of structural elements, theme development, and stylistic means. The assumption is that it forms a separate text type besides the historical novels and the novels of customs that have a more realistic style. Moreover, the historical novels almost exclusively have a third-person narrator. This can have a significant influence on the novels’ style, at least if the textual features used for categorization include personal pronouns and declined verb forms. The novelas de costumbres that are part of the corpus, in contrast, are half narrated in the first and half in the third person, which supports the observations made by Janik and Kohut about their intermediate status. As for the sentimental novel in a wider sense, that is, novels with a primary sentimental plot, but, for example, a historical setting or social and political concerns, the textual distinction of the various subgenres is assumed to be more difficult.
154In Spanish America, Romanticism was the dominant literary current in the second third of the nineteenth century and continued to influence the production of novels until the end of the century. Compared to the development of the romantic current in the European countries and North America, its acclimatization in Spanish America was delayed because of the wars of independence and subsequent political struggles such as civil wars and oligarchic regimes. The cultural sector was not fully developed yet, local cultural models were missing, and also the ideological climate was different. Nevertheless, foreign models of various kinds entered the cultural area of the Spanish-American countries discontinuously and were soon adopted, for example, French sentimental novels, or the historical novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper (Dill 1999, 120Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.; Lichtblau 1959, 65Lichtblau, Myron I. 1959. The Argentine Novel in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States.; Varela Jácome [1982] 2000, sec. 1.1.3Varela Jácome, Benito. (1982) 2000. Evolución de la novela hispanoamericana en el siglo XIX (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmct14z8.). In Spanish America, the romantic current is connected to political ideas of liberalism and nationalism. The writers are “civic poets” and not primarily literati, and they use the novel to denounce social and political grievances, promote ideologies, and suggest new models of society (Dill 1999, 121Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.).
155Formally, romantic novels are characterized by looseness, unconventionality, and the rejection of formal rigor. The protagonists are idealized heroes, who are often solitary, rootless and driven by instincts. Emotions and motives of the characters tend to be represented in stereotypical ways, and there is a tendency to reduce conflicts and rivalries to simple contrasts between good and bad characters, whose role is underlined by employing a corresponding oppositional descriptive vocabulary (Dill 1999, 120, 127–128Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.). In the novels, verisimilar elements can be combined with fantastic ones. Typical elements of the plot are turbulent and violent actions, deception, fraud, and surprising effects, for example, through disguises and discoveries (Varela Jácome [1982] 2000, sec. 1.4Varela Jácome, Benito. (1982) 2000. Evolución de la novela hispanoamericana en el siglo XIX (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmct14z8.). Even passages of pure description, for example, those concerned with representing the local landscape, are characterized by the use of a subjective and idealizing style (Lichtblau 1959, 66Lichtblau, Myron I. 1959. The Argentine Novel in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States.).
156The romantic current put forth several distinct types of subgenres of the novel, among them sentimental, historical, political, social, adventure, indianist novels, and also the novels of customs. That different subgenres of the novel played an important role in the period in which the romantic current was dominant is readily apparent from the structure of many literary histories concerned with Spanish-American nineteenth-century literature. Usually, the description of the romantic novel is subdivided into separate sections concerned with the different subgenres, which is not always the case for the later currents.107
157Regarding the textual coherence of the romantic novels, several different kinds of hypotheses can be formulated. Thematically, the inclusion of a sentimental story is a typical element of all kinds of romantic novels and might facilitate its classification against realist and naturalistic novels. Even if a sentimental plot also occurs in novels belonging to the other currents, it is less typical. Then again, the clearly distinguishable thematic subtypes of romantic novels lead to the assumption that the conventional romantic subgenre might fall into several textual subgroups if semantic features are used. In the narrow sense of linguistic style, though, it is probable that the romantic novel is coherent. A hypothesis is that specific parts of speech, vocabulary, and punctuation marks are used to express subjectivity and emotionality, for instance, many personal and possessive pronouns, qualifying adjectives and adverbs, interjections, or exclamation and question marks.
158What makes a clear distinction of works by current difficult is that there are individual works that combine elements of several currents. Especially romantic and realist elements are often combined, which is an effect of the chronologically discontinuous integration, adaptation, and further development of foreign currents in the Spanish-American context.108 Furthermore, the presence of romantic works up to the end of the nineteenth century raises the question of whether there is a contrast between an early and a late romantic style which could become visible in the categorization of the texts.
159In its artistic meaning, the term “Realism” emerged in the eighteenth century to designate an aesthetic model opposed to the idealism and individualism propagated by Romanticism (Álamo Felices 2011, 118Álamo Felices, Francisco. 2011. Los subgéneros novelescos. Teoría y modalidades narrativas. Almería: Universidad Almería.). In Europe, it began to spread in the first half of the nineteenth century and dominated from the middle of the century onwards. In Spanish America, in contrast, numerous realist novels were only published after 1880 (Varela Jácome [1982] 2000, sec. 3Varela Jácome, Benito. (1982) 2000. Evolución de la novela hispanoamericana en el siglo XIX (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmct14z8.). The realist movement was linked to the formulation of positivist philosophical theories and the development of the natural sciences. According to the positivist philosophy, new insights should derive from positive findings that are sensually graspable, actually observable, and verifiable. For the arts, this meant that their primary objective was to reflect the social reality aesthetically by accurately depicting the characters and describing the environments meticulously. In realist novels, dialogues are an important means to develop the action. They are represented in detail but without the need to put aside the omniscient perspective. In sum, the goal was to create an effect of verisimilitude, an effet de réel, which aimed to make the reader believe that what is described is the real world. By convention, a relationship of identity is assumed between the contemporary world and the mimetic fictional world. To what extent the author is understood as contributing to the creation of the fictional world with his constructive and imaginative work depends on how closely the ideal to reflect the external world directly and mimetically is followed (Álamo Felices 2011, 118–119Álamo Felices, Francisco. 2011. Los subgéneros novelescos. Teoría y modalidades narrativas. Almería: Universidad Almería.).
160That the depicted world is not shown through an idealizing filter in the realist novels entails that not only the bourgeois milieu is represented but also lower social strata. Social and political ills, such as corruption, intrigues, lobbyism, or poor education, are disclosed, for example, in the novels of the Mexican writer Emilio Rabasa. The portrayal of personal defects, such as greed, excessive materialism, or drive for recognition, is as well part of the realist repertoire, for example, in the Cuban novels “Un hombre de negocios” (1883) by Nicolás Heredia or “Mi tío el empleado” (1887) by Ramón Meza (Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba 1999, sec. RealismoInstituto de Literatura y Lingüística de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba. 1999. Diccionario de la literatura cubana (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmckh0j1.). On the one hand, the Spanish-American realist novels described the rapid economic and social development and life in the big cities, for instance, in the novel “La gran aldea. Costumbres bonaerenses” (1884) written by the Argentine Lucio Vicente López. On the other hand, rural environments were also a topic, for example, in the novel “La parcela” (1898) by the Mexican author López Portillo y Rojas (Rössner 2007, 148, 188Rössner, Michael. 2007. Lateinamerikanische Literaturgeschichte. 3rd ed. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler.).109
161Realism as a literary current prevailed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides the novels that are directly associated with this current, realistic elements are already present in earlier works. For instance, the novelas de costumbres also aspired to represent the local world and society in all its facets, but with a different motivation than the realist novels in the proper sense. Furthermore, especially Cuban novels are marked by a realistic orientation from early on and persistently in the nineteenth century because many authors were concerned with the social ills caused by the system of slavery. In terms of literary currents, this leads to works that mix romantic and realist(ic) elements, for instance, the novel “Francisco” (1839/1880) by Anselmo Suárez Romero:
la idílica presentación de los desgraciados amores de Francisco y Dorotea contrasta con las escenas de la penosa vida de los esclavos en los barracones y los castigos inhumanos que les eran infligidos por parte de sus mayorales, descritas con gran crudeza. Esta coexistencia de elementos de ambas normas estéticas – la romántica y la realista –, que tan tempranamente se inicia, caracteriza buena parte de nuestra narrativa decimonónica y perdura hasta los inicios del presente siglo (Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba 1999, sec. RealismoInstituto de Literatura y Lingüística de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba. 1999. Diccionario de la literatura cubana (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmckh0j1.)
162The aesthetic closeness of the early Cuban novels with the later realist and naturalistic novels has led Molina to consider some nineteenth-century novels as instances of Naturalism before its time. Her study covers works written and published between 1830 and 1927 (Molina 2001Molina, Sintia. 2001. El Naturalismo en la novela cubana. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.).
163The presence of realistic aspects in some of the novels of the first half of the nineteenth century is expected to complicate the textual separation of romantic and realist novels. On the other hand, the simultaneity of romantic, realist, and naturalistic works in Spanish America after 1880 and the existence of novels that included elements of several currents at once is another factor that could render the classification of the works by literary current more difficult.110 However, the assumption can also be made that there are prototypical cores of romantic, realist, and naturalistic novels in the sense of distinctive genres following aesthetic models that primarily have a European origin. In the case of the realist novel, elements that could lead to a coherent text type are specific topics such as life in the city, business and economic speculation, and the portrayal of different social classes. On a stylistic level, the hypothesis can be formulated that there are many and long descriptive passages and dialogues which have specific linguistic characteristics, for example, regarding the use of many different adjectives and nouns. These could contribute to the identification of a realist text type. A second hypothesis is that besides a realist text type in the narrow sense, another text type could become visible, in which realist and romantic elements are combined and in which the many novels that have conventionally been described as mixtures of romantic and realist(ic) elements take part.
164Like the first Spanish-American romantic and realist novels, also the naturalistic ones started from a foreign model that was successively adapted to the particular needs of expression in Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico. In the case of the naturalistic novel, the model was primarily supplied by the French author Émile Zola, who propagated a scientific conception of man and a biological and medical way of thinking. In the naturalistic novel, realist techniques were carried forward to utilize the literary work as a means of experimentation and and for case studies of milieu, anthropology, genetics, or pathologies (Dill 1999, 168–169Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.). Compared to the realist novel, the importance of the author’s creativity for producing an effect of reality is replaced by the aspiration for a pure documentary style. Nature shall be discovered “as is”. The development of the characters is a logical one, and inner reactions are subjected to mechanical processes. Reality is shown in its raw form, and no moral limits are set to the kinds of environment or human abysses that are studied. The goal is to stimulate the readers’ reflection by reproducing things as they are (Varela Jácome [1982] 2000, sec. 4Varela Jácome, Benito. (1982) 2000. Evolución de la novela hispanoamericana en el siglo XIX (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmct14z8.). In terms of characters, the broad ensemble of the realist novel tends to be reduced, and the focus is on the protagonists whose psychological development is examined. The characters expose themselves through their way of speaking, either in dialogue or indirect speech, showing the regional or social determination of their means of expression. The influence of the milieu on the life of the characters is worked out ().
165In France, the naturalistic novel spread from the 1870s onwards, and in Spanish America it became popular in the 1880s. This shows that the adoption of this literary current happened with less delay than in the case of the romantic and realist novel. However, this led to the already mentioned superimposition of all three currents in the Spanish-American countries (Varela Jácome 2000, sec. 4Varela Jácome, Benito. (1982) 2000. Evolución de la novela hispanoamericana en el siglo XIX (en formato HTML). Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmct14z8.). In Spanish America, naturalistic works were published in several different countries and in all of the three countries that are the focus here. The first and most naturalistic novels appeared in the Río de la Plata region, which includes Argentina.111 Authors whose works have been associated with the naturalistic current are, for example, the Argentine Eugenio Cambaceres, the Mexican Federico Gamboa, and the Cuban Martín Morua Delgado. For the authors, the naturalistic aesthetic provided an appropriate means to reflect the rapid economic upswing, as well as the technological and social processes of modernization that took place in the Spanish-American countries in the last decades of the nineteenth century, with all the challenges and difficulties that these brought for individual social groups or people (Schlickers 2003, 9–10Schlickers, Sabine. 2003. El lado oscuro de la modernización: estudios sobre la novela naturalista hispanoamericana. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.). The range of topics covered in naturalistic novels includes aspects of biological and environmental determinism, immigration, mental ills, materialist neuroses, sexual rage, problems of alcoholism, the destructive force of prostitution milieus, and the representation of the urban Moloch. For example, the working conditions in factories and mines, but also the tedium of idle members of the upper class, are taken into account (Dill 1999, 169Dill, Hans-Otto. 1999. Geschichte der lateinamerikanischen Literatur im Überblick. Stuttgart: Reclam.; Schlickers 2003Schlickers, Sabine. 2003. El lado oscuro de la modernización: estudios sobre la novela naturalista hispanoamericana. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.).
166Naturalistic novels share some features with realist novels because of the ambition to depict reality closely, and the different literary currents concurred temporally in the last decades of the nineteenth century. There are, however, some elements of naturalistic novels on the basis of which it can be hypothesized that they are distinguishable as textual genres. The crude style, usage of scientific or other specialized vocabularies, and the specific topics of this type of novel, such as the topics of immigration, mental and physical problems, and processes of social disintegration, are expected to facilitate their classification against realist and especially romantic novels. It is assumed that the novels that are conventionally labeled as naturalistic ones are also textually coherent to a relatively high degree. However, a difficulty might arise from the confusion and flexibility of the terms “realist” and “naturalistic” in the corresponding literary critical discourse and thus from the conventional class labels. If these terms are used with an overlapping or even identical scope, they are no longer a sign for different subgenres.112
