Genre Colonization Of Book Advertising Over Book Prefaces

This thesis aims to discover mechanisms for genre colonization of book advertising over book prefaces through an examination of changes in generic intertextuality between these two genres over the past century. Genre colonization, a new issue in genre studies responding to the dynamic and complex realities of discourse, refers to the process which "involves invasion of the integrity of one genre by another genre or genre convention" (Bhatia, 2004: 58).The present research sets out to investigate genre colonization based on an integrated analytical framework which modifies Bhatia's model of generic variation by drawing on Halliday's functional approach to tenor and interpersonal meaning. Three electronic corpora, namely, the corpus of English book advertisements (CBA), the corpus of English book prefaces written before the year 1900 (CBPl), and the corpus of English book prefaces written after the year 2000 (CBP2) are exploited for analysis. By comparing CBPl and CBP2 in terms of their intertextuality with CBA on the plane of genre and two of its closely related planes - register and text, a clear tendency is found: post-2000 book prefaces share a much greater degree of intertextuality with book advertising than pre-1900 book prefaces. This tendency is then interpreted on the plane of social practice as a result of the bending of book preface genre towards book advertising under novel challenges of highly commercialized modern society. The thesis concludes that in today's highly commercialized society, book advertising, a compulsively powerful genre, has been invading the territorial integrity of book preface genre on an enormous front, spreading its promotional elements into generic, interpersonal, and linguistic constructions ofbook prefaces.