New book announcement: Emerging Genres in New Media Environments

Edited by Carolyn R. Miller and Ashley R. Kelly

Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

This volume explores cultural innovation and transformation as revealed through the emergence of new media genres. New media have enabled what impresses most observers as a dizzying proliferation of new forms of communicative interaction and cultural production, provoking multimodal experimentation, and artistic and entrepreneurial innovation. Working with the concept of genre, scholars in multiple fields have begun to explore these processes of emergence, innovation, and stabilization. Genre has thus become newly important in game studies, library and information science, film and media studies, applied linguistics, rhetoric, literature, and elsewhere. Understood as social recognitions that embed histories, ideologies, and contradictions, genres function as recurrent social actions, helping to constitute culture. Because genres are dynamic sites of tension between stability and change, they are also sites of inventive potential. Emerging Genres in New Media Environments brings together compelling papers from scholars in Brazil, Canada, England, and the United States to illustrate how this inventive potential has been harnessed around the world.

Reviews

“This volume uses our current and previous experience to address the core questions where do genres come from and how do they come to be. From the important opening theoretical essay by Carolyn Miller that weighs the various models of genre origins to the many well-documented cases in the following chapters, this book gives us much grist to think about the nature of genres, their relation to technologies, and the protean landscape of genres before us.”

– Charles Bazerman, University of California, USA

“Emerging Genres in New Media Environments is a brilliant exposition of a crucial topic in genre studies and in cultural studies at large. Miller and Kelly’s anthology is wide ranging, sharp, and rich, with an impressive dynamic between theory, subject matter, and interpretation. It promises to be a landmark publication.”

– Sune Auken, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

“This collection adds to the growing body of knowledge about the relationship between genre and media and proposes new directions for future research on genres, thus making a unique and timely contribution to genre studies. The volume showcases cutting-edge, original research that addresses a variety of key questions about genre development, emergence, and change in the contexts of new media. The collection promises to become as important to the field of genre studies as Miller’s 1984 seminal article 'Genre as social action.’”

—Natasha Artemeva, Carleton University, Canada

The table of contents and ordering information can be found at the Palgrave Macmillan Springer site.