Background
| Our endeavors to find background information pertaining to our own study began at the Google Search Engine, http://www.google.com. A fairly obvious search term of “page length vs. genre” yielded as rather interesting result: “Length of Hair of Male Singer vs. music genre.” Since this was obviously irrelevant in the context of the current study, the search term was modified to “number of pages vs. literary genre”. This led to several websites that defined the term ‘literary genre’. Also, we found a website at which essays were available for download based on page length and genre, presumably intended for the purpose of plagiarism. We also a found a rather scintillating, but sadly, again irrelevant, analysis of Tibetan literature that was no doubt the product of much hard work. Changing the search term slightly to “book length by literary genre” led to many of the same results as the previous keyword. Clearly, our meager efforts were not sufficient to provide us the information we needed. |
 |
At this point, one member of our team switched search engines to Google Scholar (http://www.scholar.google.com), a beta-test search engine intended to limit results to scholarly articles and journal publications. A search of similar search terms led to a fascinating discussion of how the enlargement in page size of a dermohistopathological text’s newer editions has increased the readability of its diagrams. He also unearthed a computational analysis of the modern-day English language. A promising study that a particular library conducted of the ‘relative quality’ of different literary genres, upon further inspection, was found to be written in French. When the lead was pursued, all links to the paper in question were inactive. The most significant study that was found on Google Scholars was an analysis of book genre relative to repetitive language utterances of a mother reading to her language-impaired child. The study compared narrative-only storybooks to narrative-manipulative storybooks. Mothers had the same length of repeat utterances for both types of books, while the children talked more and asked more questions during the narrative-manipulative stories. Again, a fascinating study, but not immediately relevant.
 |
Thankfully, another member of the research team found better background information. She remained on the original Google Search, and encountered many of the same definitions and descriptions of literary genres using the search term “literary genre vs. book length”. Wikipedia, a questionably accurate resource, but valuable nonetheless, categorized narrative fiction by word length—a mini saga is 50 words or less, a short story between 1000 and 20000 words, and a novel is more than 50000 words. Continuing the search, she modified her keywords to “number of pages + literary genre”, finding more literary genre essays and term papers for purchase by unmotivated students. She also found a Yahoo! Group discussing favorite literary genres and another list of literary genres and definitions. |