Non Fiction Genres

10 Key excerpts on "Non Fiction Genres"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Research Methods in Creative Writing

  • Jeri Kroll, Graeme Harper(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  14 But, writers know, and have known for a long time, that the real world cannot be directly rendered into text. The novelist Henry James, for instance, wrote of the difficulty of trying to report the complexity of experience in his books, and this is an even more significant issue for non-fiction authors:

  Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue.15

  Given the difficulties of representing the intricacies of life in literature with any accuracy, and assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors have found that writing non-fiction with these complexities in mind is a challenging task. In attempting to deal with these complexities, they have conducted important research into such issues as defining ‘truth’. Their findings on this topic have discussed, for instance, the differences between factual and aesthetic truths, and the ways that authors can signal to their readers how they have dealt with such issues as gaps in their data sets, or conflicting evidence. This is especially important as while readers do have an expectation that non-fiction texts will relay ‘the truth’, they are also very accepting when authors explain the limitations in both their evidence and their own abilities. In the birthday party memory, for instance, the writer will have some data that represents fairly certain truths – who was present, how old they were at the time, what they were wearing, what food was served, what the weather was like, where the party was held, and so on. There will also be a myriad of issues that are less clear: who said what, for instance, and to whom. Even once this is ascertained, there is the more difficult question of what was meant by what was said, which will, of course, always be a matter of interpretation. The seemingly innocuous ‘Happy Birthday’, for instance, can be stated with warmth or delivered in a snide and/or ironic fashion, or with a myriad of other intentions falling between these. Even the most banal facts might not be agreed on by all the guests at the party. A photograph could show everyone around the table, but cut off at the waist. What shoes everyone was wearing could be a point of debate, as could be who was the last to leave and other such matters.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Nonfiction That Sells

  Your Guide to Writing Success

  • Rae A. Stonehouse(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Live For Excellence Productions (LFEP)

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE

  INTRODUCTION TO WRITING NONFICTION: UNDERSTANDING THE GENRE, ITS MARKET, & YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

  Understanding Nonfiction Writing: Looking at What Makes Nonfiction Different from Things Like Fiction and Poetry

  Nonfiction writing refers to a genre that presents factual and real-life information. It encompasses works based on truth, evidence, and research, providing a window into reality rather than representing imaginary stories as found in fiction or evoking emotions through metaphors like poetry. Nonfiction writing encompasses various forms, including essays, biographies, memoirs, news articles, scientific reports, and academic papers, among others.

  The fundamental feature of nonfiction writing is its basis in reality. It aims to inform and educate readers about real-world events, people, places, ideas, or concepts. Nonfiction writers conduct extensive research, relying on primary and secondary sources that offer reliable and verifiable information. This research-driven approach ensures accuracy, supports arguments with evidence, and lets readers gain a deeper understanding of a topic.

  On the other hand, fiction writing is characterized by its imaginative and creative elements. Authors create fictional worlds, characters, and events that might be inspired by real-life experiences. In fiction, the primary intention is often to entertain, evoke emotions, or explore complex themes through storytelling.

  While nonfiction revolves around facts, fiction uses elements of storytelling such as plot development, character arcs, and narrative techniques to engage readers. Fiction writers have the freedom to invent scenarios and characters, enabling them to explore unique perspectives or present thought-provoking ideas without being confined to real-world limitations.

  Similarly, poetry distinguishes itself from nonfiction by emphasizing the aesthetics of language, along with evoking emotions and conveying deep meaning through metaphor, symbolism, and imagery. Poets use various techniques, such as rhyme, rhythm, and meter, to create musical and lyrical compositions. The purpose of poetry often extends beyond conveying information, focusing more on personal expression, highlighting emotions, or encapsulating complex ideas in a condensed form.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  In Defense of Reading

  • Sarah E. Worth(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Rowman & Littlefield International

    (Publisher)

  Fiction is not a conglomeration of false sentences. It cannot be seen only as a negation of truth. It is an intentional construction of a certain kind. Things described in fictions can and often do correspond to real places, persons, and events, but fictions are not necessarily about real places, persons, and events. Fiction is a literary genre that is to be read in a particular way. Stories or narratives are a form of explanation and, as explanations, are used as justification in ways corresponding to those in which we validate truth claims. Conversely, nonfiction is also a literary genre that we are taught to read in a particular way and is dependent upon certain social and literary conventions for us to understand properly. It is not merely that which is true, simpliciter. One of the preconditions of nonfiction is that it is both true and something that can be documented. What is true also goes well beyond just “what happened” or what corresponds to “reality.” Nonfictional literature does not just appeal to a simplistic version of truth as “what really happened.” Narratives written about true events, events that really happened, are still largely constructed into stories by editing time, event, setting, tone, character, and emotion, and often by constructing or inventing causation. Narratives are also always written from a particular perspective. Nonfiction does not and cannot embrace only true accounts of an omniscient narrator. Nonfictional literature is a genre of storytelling that includes true events, but it can include much more also, like emotionally laden perspectives that could never be derived from “facts alone” or “true events.” Moreover, nonfiction includes a descriptive aspect that is necessarily inserted by a narrator

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Book of Literary Terms

  The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, Second Edition

  • Lewis Turco(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of New Mexico Press

    (Publisher)

  The Genres of Nonfiction

  “Nonfiction” is a catch-all term encompassing many sub-genres. The formal essay is a scholarly disquisition upon a particular subject, whereas the informal essay is a discussion of some topic in a less rigorous vein. Criticism , including the short form called the review or critique , is commentary on art, music, literature, drama, dance, and other forms of creative endeavor; history is writing on the past, and speculation is writing about the possibilities of the future. Professional writing is a category encompassing such subgenres as technical writing (manuals, articles on medical techniques), business writing (letters, merchandising and manufacturing reports), and report writing of other kinds, as for instance a report from a field office to the home office regarding personnel matters.

  Biography is the story of someone else’s life. The profile , an essay-length biographical character study ; autobiography , the story of one’s own life; the memoir , a reminiscent essay, and the personal essay is a discussion of some subject from the author’s particular viewpoint—if the topic is a literary one, and the style chatty and informal, it is a causerie .

  The journal is a daily record of one’s life, to be distinguished from journalism , which is reportage of current events—it is one of the mass media (singular, medium

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  A Guided Reader to Early Years and Primary English

  Creativity, principles and practice

  • Margaret Mallett(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER

  7	Non-fiction literature in English lessons

  Introduction

  English lessons are the special home of fiction and this is reflected in the length and depth of analysis of a range of genres in Chapter 6 . However, some kinds of non-fiction have an important place in the English curriculum and have, perhaps, not always received the attention they deserve. And yet the best writing of this kind has qualities which help develop critical literacy and accelerate children’s progress in reading and writing. What are the genres of non-fiction of value in English lessons? I include here autobiography and biography, ‘lyrical’ texts and those texts in print or on-screen which set out arguments to inform and nourish the debates that are a feature of lively English lessons.

  The extracts in Section 1 are concerned with diaries, autobiography and biography. Extract 53 takes up a broad canvass and confirms the place of literary kinds of non-fiction including diaries, letters, autobiography and biography – in the English programme. Extract 54 sets out Sue Unstead’s review of Michael Rosen’s biography of Roald Dahl and indicates what she values in his innovative approach to informing and involving his young readers about a gifted writer and sometimes eccentric human being.

  In Section 2, Extract 55, from Mallett’s Bookmark publication on the lyrical voice in non-fiction, attention turns to a poetic non-fiction text which describes the life cycle of the eel in such a way that text and pictures combine to draw upon and develop the imagination and feelings as well thinking and understanding. Calling such creations ‘information picturebooks’ hardly does them justice; children who have shared this book with me have commented that it is a ‘sort of poem in words and pictures’.

  Section 3 turns to some of the texts that support and inspire that part of an English programme which allows children to reflect on all the many issues that concern human beings as they live their lives. Extract 56, from an article by Rob Sanderson and Jo Bowers, considers the variety of magazines, print and online, available for children in the four to eleven age range and their potential for encouraging thinking and debate.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Documents in Crisis

  Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico

  • Beth E. Jörgensen(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  The Distinction of Fiction (1999), that she undertook to study the singularity of fictional narrative in part in response to a contemporary critical climate that has tended to disregard the distinctive differences between fiction and nonfiction, and to attribute fictionality to all types of discourse (vii). Deconstructive and postmodern theories and practices of literary writing are often said to blur the lines between genres and between fiction and nonfiction in the process of demonstrating how all verbal representations of the world are linguistic constructs. However, Cohn, like Phyllis Frus McCord to whom I referred in the introduction, refuses to accept that such blurring has made the problem disappear altogether. Cohn's work aims to show that fiction's unique claim on our attention lies in “its potential for crafting a self-enclosed universe ruled by formal patterns that are ruled out in all other orders of discourse” (vii). She develops her argument for limiting the category of fiction to nonreferential narrative by carrying out a systematic narratological comparison and contrast between various forms of history writing (biography, autobiography, historiography) and their fictional counterparts. In the present study, the focus is reversed to attend to the distinction of nonfiction by examining the interplay of conventions and expectations that inform the production and the reception of nonfictional narrative and that structure our perception of its particular relationship to material reality and human actions, past and present.

  The two Mexican writers quoted above are well-known for their contributions to literary nonfiction, in particular the chronicle and, in the case of Leñero, the documentary or nonfiction novel and documentary theater as well. Their reflections that I have excerpted articulate the fundamental connection between nonfiction writing and real world events and identifiable people, and they introduce a number of concepts and terms that arise in any discussion of nonfictional narrative: reality, real life, testimony, datum, fact, and document are part of the essential vocabulary with which to talk about the texts brought together in this book. This lexicon, which must also include other terms such as evidence, plausibility, factual status, and factual adequacy, requires a rigorous interrogation and theorization that goes well beyond the limits of commonsense usage. In this chapter I have assembled critical resources provided by studies in history and literary and genre theory in order to formulate functional definitions for a core vocabulary, without negating the persistent ambiguities inherent in each concept.

  Three distinct and competing conditions for writing and reading nonfiction inform my study, which acknowledges and seeks to explain the tensions at play among them. First, contemporary Western theories of language and representation posit the constructed, conventional nature of the discourses of both fact and fiction, and therefore destabilize the boundaries between them. Post-structuralist theorists working in many fields have challenged positivistic and humanistic assumptions about the status of the real and its linguistic referent in recognition of the irreducible role of language as constitutive and not merely reflective or expressive of human perception, memory, and communication. The contemporary interrogation of language and the overturning of the view of language as a transparent medium of representation have as one consequence an unveiling of the presumed, but false “naturalness” of certain commonsense notions that once anchored the study of literature. Roland Barthes's essay “From Work to Text,” his book S/Z, and Michel Foucault's “What Is an Author?” are examples of seminal work that contributed to exposing the discourse-determined, historically situated nature of cultural phenomena such as the literary work, realism, and authorship. With regard specifically to writing that proposes to document the past, the most radical assertion of the materiality and the power of discourse, with a corresponding negation of the notion of a ready-made reality that precedes it, is found in Foucault's histories, such as those treating sexuality, prisons, and madness. In his books, the view of events understood as “what actually happened”1

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Writing History in Film

  • William Guynn(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2

  SIGNIFYING HISTORY

  What Are Factual Narratives?

  It is, I believe, evident that a discussion of fiction and nonfiction in film cannot be separated from the theoretical debates on the question in literature, linguistics, and philosophy, which have their historic roots in antiquity and have developed significantly in the course of the last century. Indeed, the most probing work on nonfiction film in recent years relies on theoretical perspectives that come from outside film studies. Even if nonfiction in film manifests itself in specific ways, particularly because film is an audiovisual, not a literary, discourse, the larger theoretical issues are the same. A review of the critical literature is particularly relevant to examining the nonfictional character of the historical film because historians and film historians have long hesitated to give it that status. Moreover, we are, I believe, at a critical juncture: the beginning of a reexamination of traditional notions of genre that have long held back the serious study of works of nonfiction. I begin the discussion with literary theorist Gérard Genette, who has been instrumental in stirring up debate on the question.

  In 1991, Genette’s Fiction et diction launched an appeal for the study of nonfictional genres so long neglected by literary theory. In this work, Genette makes the case that the discipline of narratology has been able to ignore factual narratives by restricting its field of investigation to the “literary,” that is, the fictional genres, whether theatrical or novelistic. In so doing, it has effectively excluded from analysis the rich domain of nonfictional genres, on the basis of a difference of function. Nonfictional works are pragmatic, rather than aesthetic; they act on the reader/spectator with the intent to modify in some way his relationship to the world. The distinction goes back to Aristotle, who established the boundaries of the literary by his notions of légein and poèsis. As Genette argues, “Everything takes place therefore as if Aristotle had established a divide between two functions of language: its ordinary function (légein) to inform, interrogate, persuade, order, promise, etc., and its artistic function, which is to produce works (poiein). The first belongs to rhetoric—today we would say, rather, pragmatics—the second to poetics.”1 Moreover, poèsis, which designates production of works, is tied to the creative act of mimèsis, that is, the “simulation of imaginary actions and events.”2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Reading Children's Literature: A Critical Introduction - Second Edition

  • Carrie Hintz, Eric L. Tribunella(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Broadview Press

    (Publisher)

  When we think about nonfiction for young people, we often conceive of it as a purely didactic—or teaching—genre. History, science, and life writing can seem purely fact based, and it is undeniably true that such books aim to communicate factual information. Yet nonfiction for young people often includes stories designed to enliven the reading experience and spark an imaginative response. Reading such texts critically involves discerning whether the fictive elements diminish the capacity of the nonfictional text to communicate ideas and information, but it also involves an understanding of how a fictional element might add to a nonfictional text. Nonfiction works without fictive elements can also be read critically, with attention to the way they structure information, whether through a comparison/contrast structure, the exposition of a process or cycle, a question-and-answer format, or some other arrangement.

  Nonfiction trade books frequently overlap with the kind of reading that children complete in school classrooms, where they often use textbooks. However, nonfiction trade books are a thriving literary genre in their own right. The American Library Association (ALA) acknowledged the literary and cultural value of nonfiction in 2001, when it began awarding the Ronald F. Sibert Informational Book Medal for the best informational book published in English in the United States. Likewise, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) offers the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children, named after Johann Amos Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures,

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature

  • Josephine Guy, Ian Small(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Non-Fictional Prose

  The author of a popular encyclopaedia entry on non-fictional prose, while conceding that to define it ‘is an immensely challenging task’, nevertheless confidently goes on to characterize the genre as ‘any literary work that is based mainly on fact’, such as ‘the essay and biography’. Excluded from this category are any ‘highly scientific and erudite writings in which no aesthetic concern is evinced’.1 Leaving aside for the moment the conflation of the ‘literary’ with the ‘aesthetic’, we can note how this definition recalls the practice of an earlier generation of literary historians, such as F. W. Bateson, whose account of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy in his 1940 Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature treated non-fictional prose as being more or less synonymous with a tradition of critical writing, the value of which resided as much in what Stefan Collini has described as the distinctive ‘voice’ of the critic as in the originality or cogency of the ideas expressed (Collini 1988: 1). More recently Collini has invoked the power of voice to explain the remarkably longevity of Newman’s The Idea of a University , a volume which, he claims, continues to command the attention of modern readers despite the fact that many aspects of its argument are irrelevant, dated, or transparently erroneous (Collini 2010). In the mid-nineteenth century that voice—traditionally to be found in the work of Victorian ‘sages’ such as Carlyle, Arnold, Mill, and Ruskin—might range widely, moving effortlessly among topics such as religion, history, science, philosophy, and politics, as well as literature and the arts, at least until the 1880s when far-reaching changes in the social organization of knowledge increasingly came to equate authority and expertise with specialization and professionalization. As Philip Davis puts matters in his contribution to the new Oxford English Literary History

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Literature and Understanding

  The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts

  • Jon Phelan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Fiction is a species of language use (applied to names, sentences and discourses) and is neutral as to value. Literature, even in the narrowest sense applied to imaginative and creative writing, is a kind of discourse, essentially valued, which affords and invites a distinctive kind of appreciation.

  (Lamarque 2014: 69)

  Actually, ‘fiction’ is subject to evaluation on some occasions. Karl May was condemned when his novels set in the Wild West, and reputedly based on fact, were revealed as fiction. In this instance, the disappointment of many readers extended beyond disappointment at being hoodwinked to dissatisfaction at being left with ‘mere fiction’. In another type of case, fiction may be criticised for containing factual inaccuracy. A novel set in Cambridge which contains the line ‘I left Magdalene College and walked across the road to the Fitzwilliam Museum’ contains a factual accuracy and one that would disturb a reader familiar with the city. Let us also imagine that this detail served no purpose in the novel so could not be excused as ‘poetic license’. This type of case results in a kind of imaginative resistance, of a non-moral kind, which leads to a negative evaluation of the work. Here genre convention plays a role in evaluation. If the novel is realist fiction and if a particular detail is wrong about the subject depicted, then the novel may be criticised for containing an error. In this second example, the work is criticised for being ‘too fictional’ given the genre conventions of realist fiction.

  Nevertheless, it is true that describing a work as a work of ‘fiction’ is not usually evaluative but the kind of categorisation publishers use to help readers distinguish what is invented from what is fact; for instance, to differentiate ‘true crime’ from ‘detective fiction’. In contrast, calling a work ‘literature’ is predominantly evaluative and involves some form of aesthetic appreciation. This kind of literary appreciation seems separate from personal preference; I may recognise a late Henry James novel as literature without the work being to my taste. The upshot of this brief discussion is that I am loath to dismiss the evaluative aspect of literature as it corresponds with our ordinary usage of the term and captures something of the Gestalt of reading a text as a work of literature.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book