Defining Genre Criticism
A genre is a group of acts unified by a constellation of forms that recurs in each of its members. These forms, in isolation, appear in other discourses. What is distinctive about the acts in a genre is the recurrence of the forms together in constellation.
A genre is a complex of elements--a constellation of substantive, stylistic, and situational characteristics
Both quotes from Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson