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Part I. Interdisciplinary Approach to Storytelling ] 27 other, and that the characteristics of each genre may survive in other genres endowed with new functions. A new approach to the traditional system-oriented genre theory was developed by the famous formalist literary theorist Frye, who traced the verbal architecture that defines all human culture back to a structure that emerges from the unconscious natural world. Frye (1957) situates genres within a system of the cyclicality of nature, and concludes that there are only four kinds of genres, which he calls mythois. In addition to the two basic Aristotelian genres, he also names romance and irony. In Frye’s classification, comedy is a narrative genre that corresponds to the archetype of spring and dawn: the heroes confront the obstacles of the outside world and ultimately triumph. Romance represents the fulfillment and power of the summer and the sun. The archetypes of autumn, sunset, and death are embodied in tragedy, and winter and darkness are expressed in irony, a parody of romance. In the postmodern era, the genre classification of works became irrelevant (Imre, 1996). According to reception aesthetics, the genre is not an inherent, external set of rules, but is co-written with the text. The expectations of the recipients of a given work include genre conventions, but the quality of a literary work cannot depend on its place in the genre system but only on its impact, ultimately on its reception. The aesthetic value of a work is determined by the extent to which it is able to change the horizon of expectations of the recipient (Jauf%, 1999). 2.5 Literary Canon The act of storytelling cannot be considered without taking into account the socio-cultural dimension. The question of what constituted a valid (i.e., intelligible) popular narrative form in each period and what has survived is a matter of social judgment and cultural selection. In the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian regions, literary canon theory was formulated at the end of the 20" century to examine the expectations of a given time in relation to works of art - including literary, cinematic, and performative narratives. The primary focus of literary canon theory is to examine which works, what paradigms and what modes of interpretation become part of a nation’s cultural identity, its national canon, and how and along what value system the experts validate and ultimately canonize a work. The canon can therefore also be an instrument of ideological power. Therefore canon formation is a crucial research area in reception studies, discourse theory, and constructivism, which also take social relations into account (Kulcsär-Szabö, 1996).
