The working definition
A genre is a group of works that readers, writers and booksellers treat as alike, and, for a writer, the set of expectations a reader brings to a book she has identified as one of them. The second sense is the one this chapter uses. A genre is known by its conventions, the features its readers expect, and the film scholar Rick Altman divided them usefully into two kinds. Semantic elements are the genre’s building blocks: its places, objects, figures and kinds of event, the body in the library, the spaceship, the ballroom. Syntactic elements are the relations among them: who wants what of whom, and in what order things happen, the investigator who sets out to learn who did it, the two people kept apart by a barrier that falls. A book can use a genre’s semantic elements without its syntax, or its syntax in different dress, and much of what this chapter diagnoses lies in the gap between the two.
Among a genre’s conventions one is decisive. The core promise is the convention whose breach the genre’s readers treat as a breach of contract rather than a choice: the mystery’s answer to the question of fact it poses, the romance’s union of the lovers. A book that keeps the core promise may vary every other convention and stay on its shelf; a book that breaks it has, for many of its readers, changed genre without saying so.
A series is a sequence of separately published works that share characters, a world or a continuing story, and that readers are invited to read as related. Each of its works is a volume. The book follows its own rule, set out in Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), of keeping sequel for the reaction, dilemma and decision that follow a scene, so a later volume is called a series instalment, never a sequel. Each volume has a volume question, the question it is built on and must close, and a series may also have a series question, which runs across volumes and is closed, if at all, by the last.
Adjacent terms
Several neighbouring terms belong to other chapters and are used here in the senses those chapters give them. The genre contract belongs to The Opening Pages (Chapter 9), one of the five contracts an opening makes: what kind of book this is, and therefore what to expect, hope for and fear. This chapter follows the contract past the opening to the whole book and its ending. The series hook belongs to The Ending (Chapter 16): a book that declines to close a major question in order to create an appetite for a further volume. The declined reveal belongs to The Reveal (Chapter 15): a question of fact held visibly open to a book’s end. The steadfast arc, in which a character’s criterion holds and the change happens to others, belongs to Arc and Theme (Chapter 12), and it is the usual arc of a series hero.
A mode, in Alastair Fowler’s sense, is a genre’s character used as an adjective in a work of another kind: a gothic novel is a gothic work, while a family novel with a locked room, a document in a changed hand and an investigating daughter is a family novel in the mystery mode. Most revision problems with genre are problems of mode, since a mode borrows conventions without, by default, borrowing the core promise, and the reader does not always know which has been borrowed.
What the chapter leaves to other chapters
The genre signals of the first pages belong to The Opening Pages (Chapter 9), and the genre test for a prologue to The Prologue (Chapter 10); this chapter asks what the whole book then owes. The serial instalment’s chapter endings, Dickens’s monthly parts among them, belong to The Chapter Break (Chapter 6), since they are breaks within one story. The last line of a series, and the retroactive judgement it fires on every volume, belong to The Ending (Chapter 16), though the final volume’s load is discussed here. Arrangements of time within a volume belong to Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture (Chapter 8); this chapter takes the order of volumes, and the genres that expect a dual timeline. Market categories, publishing economics and the length a genre’s readers expect are outside the book’s scope, except where a length changes a structure.
See also: the full treatment, section 1, on the boundary between a series and a sequence of independent books that share a setting.