The theory a writer needs for genre and series answers four practical questions: what a reader expects before she has read a word, why a familiar pattern pleases rather than bores, how far a book can depart from the pattern and stay on its shelf, and what holds a reader from one volume to the next. Each strand below opens with the question and then gives the source.
What a reader brings: the horizon of expectations
The question. Two readers finish the same last chapter, and one is satisfied and the other cheated. What did they bring to the book that made the difference?
Hans Robert Jauss gave the answer a name in “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory” (1967; translated by Timothy Bahti in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 1982). A reader meets a new work with a horizon of expectations, formed by the works of its kind she has read already, and the new work is experienced against it: it confirms, varies or breaks what she expected. Genre is the largest part of that horizon, and it is supplied before the first page by the title, the cover, the shelf and the reader’s own history. The two readers of the last chapter brought different horizons, and the writer controlled neither.
Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction” (1966; translated by Richard Howard in The Poetics of Prose, 1977) shows how specific a horizon can be. The classic detective novel, he argued, contains two stories: the story of the crime, which is over before the book begins, and the story of the investigation, whose whole task is to recover the first. A reader who recognises the form expects the second story to end when the first is fully told. That expectation is the mystery’s core promise, and it is a promise about structure, not about corpses.
Why a formula pleases: repetition and its variations
The question. A reader who has read forty novels with the same hero picks up the forty-first. What is she paying for?
John Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976) called the pattern a formula, a conventional story structure that a culture’s readers know, and argued that formula fiction gives two pleasures at once: the security of a known shape and the interest of a new handling of it. Umberto Eco made the same point about series. In “The Myth of Superman” (1962; translated by Natalie Chilton, 1972) he described the iterative scheme of the comic-book hero, whose adventures begin again each time as if nothing had happened, so that he cannot be used up; in “Innovation and Repetition” (1985) he argued that a serial’s reader enjoys recognising the scheme and, if she is a competent reader of the form, enjoys the variations a writer works within it. The consequence for a writer is that a formula is not a failure of invention. A book that follows one gives the reader the pleasure she came for, and its distinction lies in what it varies.
How far a book can depart: semantics, syntax and mode
The question. A novel has a dragon, knights and a quest, and its author does not think it fantasy. Who is right, and does it matter?
Altman’s “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” (1984) separated a genre’s building blocks from the relations among them, and argued that genres change when a stable syntax takes new semantics, or familiar semantics are given a new syntax. Alastair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature (1982) made a related distinction between a kind, a genre with its full set of features, and a mode, a selection of a kind’s features carried into other works. Between them they answer the question about the dragon. A novel with fantasy’s semantic elements and another genre’s syntax is fantasy in mode, and its readers will judge it by the promises its syntax makes; whether its author uses the word matters less than whether the book tells the reader early which promises it is making. The Mechanism builds on this.
What holds a reader between volumes
The question. A reader finishes a volume and waits a year for the next. What has she been promised, and what does she remember?
Eco’s typology in “Innovation and Repetition” separated the series, in which a fixed situation recurs and each work is complete, from the saga, in which characters age and the story accumulates. Jason Mittell’s Complex TV (2015) gave the television version: the episodic series resets its world each episode, the serial carries consequences forward, and much contemporary television combines the two, closing a case each week while a story runs across the season. Each combination makes a different promise about what a single volume will close and what it may leave open. What the reader remembers across the gap the chapter has not measured; The Opening Pages (Chapter 9) and The Subplot (Chapter 14) proceed on the working assumption that she keeps a story’s emotional shape better than its mechanics, and so does this chapter.
The evidence, and the convention
Rolf Zwaan’s “Effect of Genre Expectations on Text Comprehension” (1994) gave readers the same passages, telling some they were reading literature and others that they were reading news. According to the summaries the chapter has used, readers told they were reading literature read more slowly, remembered more of the wording and built a weaker model of the situation described: an expectation of kind changed how the same words were read. The study used short texts and two broad categories, and the chapter draws a modest conclusion from it: what a reader believes she is reading changes what she attends to, before any convention is kept or broken.
Genres are historical. The detective novel’s rules of fair play were codified in the late 1920s, and the romance’s requirement of an optimistic ending is a definition its own writers’ association adopted. Claims about which genres sell most, or about how readers of one genre regard another, the chapter treats as impressions, and it treats no genre as more serious than another: literary fiction has conventions and a core promise of its own, set out in The Taxonomy.
See also: the full treatment, section 2, with Todorov’s two stories worked on an example, Eco’s typology in full and Pamela Regis’s account of the romance.