In this article we test the hypothesis that genre-inherent quantitative linguistic parameters can be reduced to a list of few provided with strictly defined ranges of value. The current research as ...part of a large project is aimed at contrastive analysis of textbooks on History and Social Studies, and adventure stories. Using RuLingva1, we identified 18 genre variables, computed their frequencies and employed the Kruskal-Wallis H Test to evaluate the differences significance. The results suggest that the list of the most indicative parameters include sentence length, noun genitive case, future tense, ratio of verbs to nouns, provisionally called ‘narrativity’, and frequency. All the identified parameters have statistically significant differences and three of them (sentence length, genitive noun, and “narrativity”) are implemented in non-overlapping “genre-inherent” ranges of values attributed to (a) History and Social studies textbooks and (b) adventure stories. With the view that the target audience of adventure stories are not expected to demonstrate high levels of professional training but logical skills, we argue that the relatively stable readability of adventure stories, i.e. FKGL = 8-9, can also be attributed to the genre-inherent characteristics. Our results certify that incorporating text complexity indices improve the classification performance of genre quantitative analysis. We also offer our views on linguistic and statistical aspects of the proposed approach for future studies. Further research is needed to see how the same parameters are exploited in texts of other genres and subject domains.
La fiction d’aventures occupe une place importante dans la production littéraire au Québec entre 1837 et 1900. De jeunes hommes issus des professions libérales, comme Joseph Marmette, Wenceslas ...Eugène Dick et Pamphile Le May, adaptent à un contexte québécois les procédés d’Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas et James Fenimore Cooper. Guerres de la Nouvelle-France, poursuites dans les bas-fonds montréalais, complots et meurtres sur les terres de la colonisation : le roman d’aventures chante les actions héroïques ou explore les recoins les plus sombres de l’âme humaine. Souvent jugé immoral par les autorités religieuses, le genre gagne pourtant en popularité grâce aux avancées de la presse et de l’alphabétisation. Les femmes, ferventes lectrices, inspirent des héroïnes fortes et patriotiques. Les trente-deux récits étudiés dans cet ouvrage expriment non seulement un désir d’évasion, mais aussi des réflexions politiques et juridiques pour la défense des droits dans la société canadienne-française.
”How about a drink together, before the ship sinks?” Fact and Fiction in Erik Pallin’s Kaparkaptenen på Emden The First World War gave rise to a surge of war novels, many of which were aimed at a ...young audience. These novels can be characterized as adventure stories with boys as their main target group. Swedish author Erik Pallin’s Kaparkaptenen på Emden: Romantiserad skildring från det stora världskriget 1914 (The Privateer Captain of Emden: Romanticized Depiction from the Great World War in 1914) was published in December 1914. It is not only one of the first Swedish youth novels about the war, but also one of the most intriguing as the tension between reality and fiction is particularly strong in Pallin’s novel. It tells the story of the German cruiser Emden whose raids in the Indian Ocean attracted much attention from journalists and authors. The article investigates how Pallin depicted the war for his young readers, focusing on the relationship between fact and fiction. The analysis shows that Pallin, much like the journalists reporting on Emden, transforms Emden’s warfare into heroic adventure tales and portrays Emden’s captain as a charismatic hero who symbolizes the male ideal of the time. The analysis concludes that Kaparkaptenen på Emden to some extent can be considered a “newsreel novel” (Paris), but that Pallin also romanticizes Emden’s warfare to appeal to his young readers. Rather than depicting the atrocities of real-life war, Pallin presents the war as an adventure with idyllic, romantic, and comical elements. The novel’s happy ending, with the war coming to an end, suggests that Pallin wished to take a stance against the war, but it can also be read as a strategy used to appeal to his young audience by offering them a story of hope.
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