What is Genre

Genre is ‘a style or category of art, music, or literature.’ The main theorist is called Steven Neale, his theory is that all genres have their similarities and repetitions but what separates them is their differences. Neale sees genre as something that evolves over time, not just a set of fixed categories that use the same repertoire of elements. He believes that genre is a historic specificity, which means that different genres change over time. For instance, a sci-fi movie in the 1950s has changed drastically in comparison to modern day sci-fi movies. As genres are changing and as new additions are added to the body of similar texts, Neale refers to as the corpus. A hybridisation is when two genres are combined. For example, a rom-com or a sci-fi/western film.

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