1,721,082 research outputs found
From Romance to Roberts and Back Again: genre, authorship and the construction of textual identity in contemporary popular romance novels
No full textIn this dissertation the relation between genre and authorship in the oeuvre of contemporary American popular romance writer Nora Roberts is analyzed. Roberts is the author of over 200 popular romance novels published in the course of the last three decades. Although Roberts is one of the most widely read authors on the planet there are currently more than 400 million copies of her books in print she is not a particularly famous figure. This remarkable contradiction between popularity and obscurity that surrounds Roberts and her vast oeuvre is studied in this dissertation via an analysis of the relation genre-authorship in this body of work. As genre fiction Roberts oeuvre is, on the one hand, part of a type of literature that today is overwhelmingly conceptualized in generic terms popular romance novels are generally conceived of as generic instances instead of as unique books written by individual authors. On the other hand, however, this oeuvre is marked by a popularity that is unprecedented in the popular romance genre Roberts is the genres single most successful and popular author which indicates that Roberts does have a strong authorial identity. The multifaceted process in which this authorial identity developed and the ever shifting relation between genre and authorship that crucially underlies these developments are studied in this dissertation. These analyses are carried from what in very general terms can be considered a poststructuralist methodological perspective; authorship is conceptualized as the author function (Foucault, 1969) while genre is, following insights from contemporary genre theory (Frow, 2006), conceived of as an entity located on the crossroads between the text, its use and its user(s). This theoretic framing gives rise to a double level of analysis in which both the narrative and the paratextual (Genette, 1987) characteristics of the oeuvre are considered. Concretely, this dissertation focuses on three strategies or parameters which play a role in shaping the relation genre-authorship in Roberts oeuvre; these are first the presence of generic romance conventions, second the degree of generic hybridity and third the role of narrative serialization. The resulting triple analyses, which always consist of both a narrative and a paratextual level, trace, map and analyze in detail the development of Roberts author name and concomitant authorial identity in relation to the popular romance genre in which her work is situated. These establish that, on the one hand, Roberts authorial identity is strongly developed over the course of the last thirty years Nora Roberts is not only a star in the so-called romance community, but her name has developed into a commercially powerful brand name in its own right but that, on the other hand, in a mainstream context Roberts author name and identity remain tightly related to one author in so far as Roberts is known in her native United States, she is predominantly known as a popular romance author. To that extent the generic and authorial identity merge.status: Publishe
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Ch-Ch-Changes: Voice in the Contemporary Romance Genre
No full textMany studies of the romance genre written from a feminist perspective, including Radway's classic study Reading the Romance (1984), have described the genre as one which is conservative and does little or nothing to challenge patriarchal social structures. My analysis of a corpus of handbooks for writing romance novels suggests that the genre is neither static nor formulaic and that the concomitant passive conceptualisation of the romance author is incorrect. While these handbooks confirm the existence of strong generic narrative frames, they also emphasize the crucial importance of high culture values such as novelty, creativity, idiosyncrasy and originality. Much emphasis is placed on the concept of an author’s personal voice, i.e. the combination of all the elements which make her writing unique.
These complex strategies undermine the traditionally passive conception of the romance author. Writing good romance novels requires the ability to be creative, original and idiosyncratic within the genre's narrative constraints. In short, the handbooks claim these texts need to be simultaneously universally recognizable (as romance novels) and distinctively individual (as written by a specific author). I argue that because the idiosyncratic and original dimension of a romance novel is buried in its universal framework, the creatively active role of its authors is generally not recognized, although, as my analysis indicates, it is crucially important.
This active role of the authors contributes to the dynamics of the genre, which is essentially adaptive and innovative in nature, incorporating general social transformations. An analysis of a corpus of contemporary romances suggests changing elements include the characterisation of the protagonists, their interaction, the latent value system, etc. This generic plasticity not only contradicts the traditional static image of the genre, but might also indicate that the romance genre is no longer as affirmative of patriarchal social structures as previously suggested.status: Publishe
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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