This chapter turns from the question of the Gospels’ literary form to that of their literary formation. According to David Strauss, no preceding understanding of the Gospels shared closer proximity to the emerging “mythical point of view” than “ancient allegorical interpretation” – an astonishing claim left unexamined since his Life of Jesus was first published. Strauss’s comparison of the mythical and allegorical views cuts closer to the heart of Origen’s sense of the figurative nature of the Gospels than any other account of early criticism of the Gospels. Nevertheless, I challenge Strauss’s final charge of unrestrained interpretive “arbitrariness” resulting from Origen’s view. I show instead that Origen locates the formation of the Gospel narratives in the Evangelists freely “making use” of the traditions they had received for their own purposes, freedom reflected in the distinctive (even discordant) characteristics of their narratives, which differ according to how the authors sought, “each in his own way,” to “teach what they had perceived in their own mind by way of figures.” Thus, for Origen, the Evangelists themselves were “figurative readers” of the life of Jesus.

Origen’s surprising presence within David F. Strauss’s genealogy of the critical examination of the life of Jesus ought to stir contemporary readers from slipping into their own forms of presumption regarding when, exactly, reading of the Gospels first became critical or what the term “critical” even means. Strauss’s presentation also underscores the difficulty of fashioning a portrait adequate to such a unique figure and introduces the need to retrieve Origen’s own first principles of Gospel reading. Here, I lay the requisite groundwork for addressing Part I’s overarching question (“What is a Gospel?”) by showing that, for Origen, the term “Gospel,” strictly speaking, does not designate just any discourse bearing the early Christian proclamation, but rather one that does so under the form of narratives of the life of Jesus. The stage is thus set for the more pivotal – and tortuous – question: What kind of narratives are they?

Juliette J. Day explores the profound meaning that texts have for liturgy. It is crucial, however, that texts are not considered as a narrow or equivocal category. To the contrary, texts provide an extraordinarily rich palette of genres, languages, and discourses, each of which deserves respect in its own right and which, moreover, has always to be seen in context.

Ezra Pound called Ulysses ‘a triumph in form’. In contrast, Holbrook Jackson deplored it as ‘chaos’, referring to ‘the arrangement of the book’ as ‘the greatest affront of all’. T. S. Eliot justified the ‘formlessness’ of Ulysses as a reflection of Joyce’s dissatisfaction with the novel form. Taking such comments as a springboard, this chapter attends to Ulysses’s capacity to produce pronounced effects of both form and formlessness, arguing that its longstanding position at the apex of the modernist canon is connected to this artful duality. Through its extensive intertextuality and practice of a gamut of generic forms, Joyce’s shape-shifting book invites its own critical insertion into ‘the tradition’. Simultaneously, it resists full absorption into any singular critical scheme through its flouting of expectations of stylistic unity and narrative closure. Ulysses achieves that exquisite balancing of pattern and disorder, or novelty and familiarity, that maximizes a work’s chance of being rated as ‘high art’. Yet its recognition as such was also considerably aided by the interpretations formulated by Joyce and his champions in the early days of the book’s reception.

This chapter explores Latinx speculative fiction – the capacious term for genres that include anything from science fiction, fantasy, and apocalyptic fiction to horror, alternative histories, and supernatural fiction and their vast array of subgenres – and asks why Latinx writers turn to speculative tropes to tell their stories, and what unique narrative possibilities genre fiction offers. The chapter argues that Latinx speculative fiction offers a powerful tool for examining race, ethnicity, national belonging, and diaspora, revealing how Latinx identities and Latinidad have been shaped by violent historical forces that veer on the otherworldly, and how reading through this lens uncovers tropes and narratives that might otherwise remain hidden. The chapter illustrates the importance of Latinx speculative fiction as a paradigm for reading, one that exceeds national boundaries, establishes thematic networks across time and space, offers new avenues for discussing identity formations, and, moreover, requires a redefinition of Latinidad as a speculative endeavor.

The introduction provides an overview of the volume, situating the chapters within some of the historical, social, and literary transformations of the past thirty years and providing an account of the different sections that organize the collection. Part I chronicles the new migrations, emerging literary institutions, conceptual shifts, and historical events that have transformed the field of Latinx literary studies since 1992. Part II focuses on genre, paying particular attention to how popular genres have fostered new racial imaginaries. Part III focuses on the different media that emerged as important vehicles for Latinx storytelling and literary expression, while the final part surveys important theoretical developments concerning race, sexuality, and literary form. The volume thus surveys a period that begins with historical recuperations of texts that were marginalized and ends with decolonial critiques that seek new ways of knowing.

This chapter proposes that the English-language Latinx melodrama of the twenty-first century owes much of its rise in visibility and market viability to the transnational success of the Latin American telenovela in the late twentieth century. The chapter traces the notable influence that the telenovela genre has had on Latinx melodrama and highlights the way telenovelas have mobilized and attracted Latinx audiences as well as registered the political intensities of Latinx life in the twenty-first century. The chapter includes a brief overview of how Latin American telenovelas first came to the attention of English-language television producers and a definition of the genre as a melodramatic vehicle informed by José Muñoz’s “brown feeling.” Ugly Betty and Jane the Virgin offer examples of how adaptations have recognized their telenovela origins and influences. East Los High (2013–2017) stands out as one of the few successful English-language telenovelas. Party of Five (2020) – a reboot of the 1994 dramedy – leans into a telenovela-style melodrama that emphasizes the stakes of the story. The chapter ends with a brief overview of several recent shows that are influenced by the telenovela genre.

This chapter focuses on digital collaboration when learning an additional language (L2), a specific type of learner–learner interaction. In CALL contexts, collaboration has almost exclusively been researched in connection with writing, which will be the focus of this chapter. The chapter first provides a definition of collaboration versus cooperation and then a literature review of digital collaboration, mainly in writing contexts. We conclude with a list of strategies for promoting collaboration and suggestions for future collaboration contexts and research.

Of late, Asian Americanist literary and cultural critics have turned their attention to “genre” fiction, especially popular genres that fall under the heading of “speculative fiction.” This chapter argues that this turn to genre – distinct from, though related to, the “genre turn” in Anglophone cultural production – is the latest installment in a perennial contestation over the objects and theories of realism. What appears to be attention to increasingly minute subgenres, moreover, is in fact evidence of a critical realist reading practice that is responsive to the increasing salience of Asia’s capitalist modernity relative to the account of racial formation that has traditionally grounded Asian American studies.

In Chapter 4, we discussed the two approaches to grammar that have been taught in Australian schools: traditional grammar, and Halliday’s functional grammar. We highlighted some limitations of traditional grammar and outlined the key concepts of functional grammar, which significantly influences English curricula in Australia and globally. While Chapter 4 emphasised explicit grammatical knowledge required by teachers, this chapter focuses on genres, text types, and the teaching of grammar and text types through explicit pedagogical methods.

Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle produced a series of satires in a distinctive mock-didactic mode, the mock art. Originally Swift used it to attack a ‘mechanical’ dissenting clergy. Later he adapted it to larger issues concerning the fragmentation and uncontrolled accumulation of knowledge in the modern age. John Gay broadened the theme by exploring its cognitive dimensions. It was in political polemic, however, that mock-technical satire achieved its widest circulation, as a critical trope against state-craftsmen and artificial politicians. Finally, in Peri Bathous Pope and John Arbuthnot imagined a wholly artificial poetic art. Their critical thought-experiment ends this line of development in the mock-art idea. With each successive iteration, its basis in the social denigration of skilled workers receded, and the satire became more ambivalent. Pope, at first the most abusive of the denigrators, at last produced the most balanced and experimental of all the Scriblerian mock arts.

This chapter discusses Shelley’s complex orientation towards Romantic-period drama and theatre culture. For Shelley, drama provided a key opportunity for generic experimentation that is continuous with his lyrical innovations. These innovations, however, go beyond producing new kinds of Romantic ‘closet dramas’, which were intended for a smaller, more bourgeois reading public. To argue this claim, the chapter attends to how Shelley’s writings on ancient Greek dramaturgical principles resonated with his interest in Romantic-period popular theatre. As shown in his dramatic poetic theory, Shelley attempted to realise his ideal intersection of aesthetics, historical progress, and contemporary social change in works sometimes intended for popular consumption. As demonstrated by his hopes to stage certain plays, Shelley’s dramatic efforts indicate that embodiment and mixed media forms were essential to his broader poetics.

This chapter addresses the relationship between Shelley’s epic theory and practice with reference notably to Laon and Cythna and “A Defence of Poetry”, as well as Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound. The essay shows how Laon and Cythna breaks with epic tradition – and exceeds Shelley’s own theoretical account of the genre – in finding creative solutions to the problem of how to link past, present, and future, as well as the local and the universal, without didacticism or what Shelley in the ‘Defence’ calls the ‘gross’ sense of prophecy: a foretelling of the future. I contend that Shelley’s epic poetry does not seek to recuperate past moments of social coherence to guide and unify the present or predict the future so much as to leave space for not knowing what will come. Shelley’s experimental epics regard a hopeful uncertainty as, paradoxically, the only certain means of reform.

The Ottoman Empire left a rich and multilingual legacy in history writing, one that scholars are only starting to explore. Eclipsed for a time after the opening of the Ottoman state archives, chronicles attract intense interest not only as sources to be mined for facts, but for what these works can tell us about wider issues – from elite and popular worldviews to politics and patronage, literary history, intellectual horizons, and others. But if the study of the past through reading, writing, copying, and listening to works of history was hugely popular in the empire, Ottoman views of history are not entirely like our own, especially in their conceptual baggage. This chapter surveys some of these issues: What are the sources? How can we access them? What kinds of practical or methodological issues do they raise? Last, what paths do chronicles offer for future research in Ottoman studies?