...Timothy S. Murphy © 2011 by University of Oklahoma 2011 Welcome to Our Readers t i m o t h y s. m u r p h y , g e n e r a l e d i t o r Since it began publication at Chicago Circle (University of Illinois at Chicago) in 1968, Genre has been an independent scholarly journal...

... where one person (the writer) does all the work and another (the reader) simply enjoys the results. Rather, to be a reader is also to make a commitment to being a creator or collaborator. At first, “Ruth” is very interested in the possible provenance of the journal: How did it arrive on her shore...

...Linda Margarita Greenberg The epistolary genre suggests its own authenticity, asking the reader to suspend disbelief and to treat the letters that compose its pages as historical artifact. Similarly, ethnic literature is a field too often valued for its sociological truth, admired for the extent...

... the history it relates and its ethical implications. To promote this assessment, Merwin inculcates a judicious self-questioning in his readers by means of his narrative structure, which emphasizes the discrepancy between plot and story. By making readers keenly aware of the mechanics of his storytelling...

... understanding of witnessing as providing a faithful documentary account of a personal experience. Much like its prose counterpart, poetic testimony enacts a quasi‐contractual relationship between authors and readers, whereby the former are committed to telling the truth about a directly experienced event...

...Ellen Levy Levy's chosen model for how to read poems is not a literary critic but an art historian, T. J. Clark. Why? To some extent, the author is following a more generalized “visual turn” in literary studies. But Clark is also a skilled and devoted close reader who, like many in literature...

... or readers back from “the point.” Children, however, often relish the long middle portions of their storybooks, wanting to see how events move forward and back, rather than just how they end. Poets, along with post-modern writers of fiction, also have more tolerance for the openness of narrative middles...

... of the cliché facilitates rather than impedes their efforts to animate “dead metaphors.” Ashbery, a dedicated reader, translator, and critic of Roussel, adapts Roussel's methods, but his adaptations owe much to the work of a crucial intermediary, Duchamp, whose “bachelor machines” originated in his reading...

... bind in which Rachel's art depends upon an imperial, exploitative society. Despite this dire view of modern society, Woolf's subversion of the politics of literature not only disrupts her readers' cultural presuppositions but also posits an alternative. In particular, Woolf confronts the view...

... deep nostalgia in an aesthetics of homemaking, encouraging young readers to mourn for a vanished past through their carefully crafted lexicon of desire and intimacy. The building of the little house itself is a production of snugness made possible by the theft of Osage lands. Ultimately, Prairie...

... emendations before its publication in the 1930 collection Flowering Judas . This version of this story often serves as the apparently definitive or even only version for both scholars and casual readers. Recognizing the unstable and evolving nature of the story leads to a more expansive understanding...

... moment even to a reader to whom the political outcome is known. Thus Bowen's changes to narrative discourse produce a tension between the focalized present and the project of looking back at history, conveying an ambivalent mixture of lamentation, critique, and tentative responsibility that characterizes...

... architectural studies and tourist guides. The enigmatic qualities of this lyric, however, have frequently made it hard for readers unacquainted with Cumbrian culture to recognize the ethical significance of the turbulent local history that informs the apparently inconsequential regional practice that the poem...

... is a deliberate and vital influence, applied to guide the reader's response to the text but also to expose the possibilities for a modern sort of tragedy. Focusing on these works, this essay argues that the bourgeois novelistic universe can also be fertile ground for devastating tragic events, that the conflict...

... thus calls for a more holistic response to cultural conflicts while inviting readers to reflect on the contradictions and repressions of modern reason. Copyright © 2018 by University of Oklahoma 2018 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “Erlkönig” tragedy George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel reason...

...David Mastey This article shows the ways child soldier narratives, a predominantly African genre of literary writing, invite readers to reimagine the relationship between Western humanitarianism and its intended recipients. It begins by defining two basic types of humanitarian groups. Operational...

... late fiction, a countercurrent the article reads in terms of Jamesian camp. Combining the reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser with recent work in affect theory—specifically Sianne Ngai’s work on tone—the article offers readings of James’s The Sacred Fount (1901) and The Golden Bowl (1904) in terms...

... of the genre as a backward-looking nostalgic form while also opening anew the question of regionalism’s complicated appeal for its contemporary readers. While beginning and ending with Sarah Orne Jewett’s representative remnant figure, Captain Littlepage, the essay also surveys several lesser-known examples...

...Victoria A. Reuter The literary rant is a unique mode of expression employed by dispossessed subjects to performatively highlight the mechanisms of their oppression and to create a rhetorical and political subject position from which to speak. The rant relies on the reader’s complicity to witness...

.... The conflict between the search for knowledge and the inadequacies of narrative would appear to doom the encyclopedism of Rahman’s characters and readers alike, but the novel complicates this conclusion. Rather than refuting or embracing the pursuit of knowledge, In the Light fosters a uniquely postcolonial...