Everybody knows, and maybe even loves, a microgenre. Plague romances and mommy memoirs. Nudie-cutie movies, Nazi zombies, and dinosaur erotica. Baby burlesks, Minecraft fiction, grindcore, premature ejaculation poetry...microgenres come in all varieties and turn up in every form of media under the sun, tailor-made for enthusiasts of all walks of life. Coming into use in the last decade or so, the term "microgenre" classifies increasingly niche-marketed worlds in popular music, fiction, television, and the Internet. Netflix has recently highlighted our fascination with the ultra-niche genre with hilariously specific classifications -- “independent supernatural dramedy featuring a strong female lead” – that can sometimes hit a little too close to home. Each contribution in this collection introduces readers to a different microgenre, drawn from a range of historical periods and from a variety of media. The Microgenre presents a previously untreated point of cultural curiosity, revealing the profound truth that humanity's desire to classify is often only matched by the unsustainability of the obscure and hyper-specific. It also affirms, in colorful detail, what most people suspect but have trouble fathoming in an increasingly homogenized and commercial West: that imaginative projects are just that, imaginative, diverse, and sometimes completely and hilariously inexplicable.

This book introduces a research applications in Web intelligence. It presents a number of innovative proposals which will contribute to the development of web science and technology for the long-term future, rendering this work a valuable piece of knowledge.

This collection of essays by leading functional linguists presents the latest perspectives on language and discourse in educational settings. The book questions the idea of 'discourse' to reveal that the social processes of learning are imbued with the ideologies of the society and education system within which learning takes place. The contributors take into account the historical and cross-cultural perspectives of both classroom practices and the student's own awareness of the ideological meanings of language activities. Language, Education and Discourse is divided into two sections. Part one covers early childhood and the growing development of a language system from the basic semiotic system of the infant. This is followed by an analysis of the beginnings of literacy in kindergarten, the introduction to writing in primary school and the ideological content of reading material. Part two furthers this analysis by looking at discourse in secondary and tertiary education. The contributors pose questions about the role and importance of teaching grammar in the school system, and finally examine how to refine the discourse of education. This book will be useful to academics interested in the latest functional perspectives on language as it is used in education. >

Published in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade’s endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context. Contributors trace the Robinsonade’s roots from the eighteenth century to generic affinities in later traditions, including juvenile fiction, science fiction, and apocalyptic fiction, and finally to contemporary adaptations in film, television, theater, and popular culture. Taken together, these essays convince us that the genre’s adapt- ability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its relevance to this day. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Social networks provide a powerful abstraction of the structure and dynamics of diverse kinds of people or people-to-technology interaction. Web 2.0 has enabled a new generation of web-based communities, social networks, and folksonomies to facilitate collaboration among different communities. This unique text/reference compares and contrasts the ethological approach to social behavior in animals with web-based evidence of social interaction, perceptual learning, information granulation, the behavior of humans and affinities between web-based social networks. An international team of leading experts present the latest advances of various topics in intelligent-social-networks and illustrates how organizations can gain competitive advantages by applying the different emergent techniques in real-world scenarios. The work incorporates experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories with specific network technology problems. Topics and Features: Provides an overview social network tools, and explores methods for discovering key players in social networks, designing self-organizing search systems, and clustering blog sites, surveys techniques for exploratory analysis and text mining of social networks, approaches to tracking online community interaction, and examines how the topological features of a system affects the flow of information, reviews the models of network evolution, covering scientific co-citation networks, nature-inspired frameworks, latent social networks in e-Learning systems, and compound communities, examines the relationship between the intent of web pages, their architecture and the communities who take part in their usage and creation, discusses team selection based on members’ social context, presents social network applications, including music recommendation and face recognition in photographs, explores the use of social networks in web services that focus on the discovery stage in the life cycle of these web services. This useful and comprehensive volume will be indispensible to senior undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in Social Intelligence, as well as to researchers, developers, and postgraduates interested in intelligent-social-networks research and related areas.

Seth MacFarlane has made an immense mark on popular culture through both his live action and animated television series: Family Guy, American Dad!, The Cleveland Show, and The Orville. While MacFarlane has garnered a large legion of fans, even those who do not personally watch Family Guy, this longest running series, will be quick to recognize images of Peter and Stewie Griffin: a caricature of the clueless dads from sitcoms of yesteryear and an inexplicably queer-coded evil baby genius, respectively. This book explores Family Guy and Seth MacFarlane's other animated series closely, examining how the series uses satire and other strategies to construct specific ideas related to sex, gender, and family. The authors argue that the series, like many other television series, contribute to our collective understanding of family, and reinforce (at times) unfavorable gender stereotypes.

From airport bookstores to deckchairs, as audiobooks downloaded by commuters, and on Kindles and other portable devices, twenty-first century bestsellers move in old and new ways. This Element examines the locations and mobilities of the contemporary bestseller as a multi-format commercial object. It employs paratextual, textual, and site-based analysis of the spatiality of bestsellers and considers the centrality of geography to the commercial promise of these books. Space, Place, and Bestsellers provides analysis of the spatial logic of bestseller lists, evidence-rich accounts of the physical and digital retail sites through which bestsellers flow, and new interpretations of how affixing the label 'bestseller' individual authors and titles generates industrial, social, and textual effects. Through its multi-layered analysis, this Element offers a new model for studying the spatiality of popular fiction.