ABSTRACT
I now want to pick up a theme which has run through this book, namely that modes of analysis which work well for one literary genre also give us interesting insights into texts from the other genres. Although the three genres can be distinguished in general terms from one another through (i) reference to their different prototypical discourse structures (see 2.2.1, 6.2 and 9.2) and (ii) some prototypical language features (for example the fact that poetry is written in lines and typically has a high density of metaphor and other rhetorical figures), there are many texts which have mixed genre characteristics. We tend to think of prose as narrative, but it also contains a lot of the interactional discourse which we associate primarily with drama, and quite a lot of poems have interactive patterns too. Some plays, in spite of being composed of dialogue, consist largely of poetry, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama being obvious examples. It is to these 'mixed' genre texts which we will now turn. I will provide extended analyses of (i) a scene from a poetic drama, Macbeth, and (ii) an extract from a short story, Somerset Maugham's 'The Force of Circumstance', which consists almost entirely of character—character interaction.
