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Genre criticism is a method within rhetorical criticism that analyzes texts in terms of their genre: the set of generic expectations, conventions, and constraints that guide their production and interpretation. In rhetoric, the theory of genre provides a means to classify and compare artifacts in terms of their formal, substantive and contextual features. By grouping artifacts with others which have similar formal features or rhetorical exigencies, rhetorical critics can shed light on how authors use or flout conventions for their own purposes. Genre criticism has thus become one of the main methodologies within rhetorical criticism.
Literary critics have used the concepts of genres to classify speeches and works of literature since the time of Aristotle, who distinguished three rhetorical genres: the legal or judicial, the deliberative or political, and the ceremonial or epideictic. Since then, rhetorical approaches to genre and understanding of the term "genre" have evolved in several ways. New genres have been studied for their rhetorical effectiveness - like sermons, letters, and (more recently) non-verbal genres like political cartoons, film, and public monuments. Further contemporary genre criticism has revised understanding of genre in several ways. The first turn, represented by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975), among others, focused on the formal features of communication. The second turn, represented by Carolyn Miller, among others, focused on recurring socio-cultural circumstances. In the latest turn, critics have begun applying formalist and socio-cultural concepts to new-media artifacts that tend to resist classification into traditional genre-categories.