Genre Analysis

In their introduction to Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy, Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff provide an overview of the various theories of genre. Increasingly, they write, genre has come to mean more than just a “classificatory tool”:

[. . .] genre has come to be defined less as a means of organizing kinds of texts and more as a powerful, ideologically active, and historically changing shaper of texts, meanings, and social actions. From this perspective, genres are understood as forms of cultural knowledge that conceptually frame and mediate how we understand and typically act within various situations. This view recognizes genres as both organizing and generating kinds of texts and social actions, in complex, dynamic relation to one another. (Bawarshi and Reiff 4)

With this perspective of genres as more than just text types, but likewise as dynamic, social actions, we can consider the work of Elizabeth Dyke in her manuscript recipe book as an object performing a communicative, social act.

A useful tool for performing a genre analysis of Dyke’s work, for scholars, teachers, or students, is Amy Devitt, Mary Jo Reiff, and Anis Bawarshi’s textbook, Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres. In Chapter 2, Devitt, Reiff, and Bawarshi discuss moving beyond simply reading genres to analyzing them. They write: “Genre analysis involves the close and critical reading of people’s patterns of communication in different situations within scenes” (63).

Devitt, Reiff, and Bawarshi next divide genre analysis into four steps (63):

1. Collecting samples of a genre
2. Finding out where, when, by whom, why, and how the genre is used
3. Identifying rhetorical and linguistic patterns in the genre
4. Determining what these patterns tell us about the people who use it and the scene in which it is used

Step one of this process points out that samples of a genre are needed in order to perform an analysis of the patterns that exist in the genre. So, other recipes are needed. This raises an interesting issue: to what other recipes might one compare Dyke’s? One possibility is to compare to contemporary recipes to determine the ways in which the genre has changed over time. As an example, consider this page, which analyzes the distinctions between recipes for almond cakes/cookies, those found with Dyke’s manuscript and those in contemporary recipes online.

But perhaps a more thorough genre analysis would benefit from comparing to other recipes from a similar time and location to Dyke’s recipe book. One such example text is Hannah Glasse’s The Complete Confectioner, which, like Dyke’s recipe book, is housed at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, as well as available online. This could well serve as a starting point for gathering samples to understand the genres of the early modern recipe and recipe book.

Works Cited and Additional Resources:

Bawarshi, Anis S., and Mary Jo Reiff. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. Parlor Press, 2010.

Devitt, Amy, Mary Jo Reiff, and Anis Bawarshi. Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres. 2018. https://www.amazon.com/Scenes-Writing-Strategies-Composing-Genres/dp/1981076549

Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 70, no. 2, 1984, pp. 151-67.