Literature is a body of written (or oral) works, such as novels, poems and so on, that use words to stimulate the imagination and confront the reader with a unique vision of life. It is a creative, universal form of expression that addresses the emotional, spiritual, and/or intellectual concerns of humanity. The novel, for example, makes the reader see connections among various phenomenons and look at something in a way never thought about before. On the other hand, the novel may take the reader into the mind of the writer and make him/her feel they actually know the author. The characters, events, and ideas in the novel become part of their experience. The following will discuss these contrasting views of literature, paying particular attention to 'genre' theory and 'author expressivity', of which examples will be drawn from Jeanette Winterson's first novel, 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit'. It should be noted that reference is made to the main character in this essay as "Jess" (as in the film version) although the same character is referred to as "Jeanette" in the novel.

In keeping with the Romantic concept of literature as a whole, it is believed by many literary theorists, that texts are ascribed a coherence deriving from the author's conscious thought, or unconscious desire, or as Williamson (1989) says, 'growing from the mind of the artist' (Williamson, 1989: 8). The author uses his/her text to preach the value of his/her own pure, emotional self-expression. This may not just be a 'spontaneous overflow or feeling' but 'a process in which emotion is re-created imaginatively' (Williamson, 1989: 4-5). Tomashevsky (1998) for example, believes there are only two types of narratives. Firstly, the author knows everything, including the hidden thoughts of the characters. He calls these 'omniscient' texts. Secondly, there are those texts where the whole tale is filtered through the mind of the narrator with each piece of information accompanied by an explanation of how and when he/she learned about it. These he calls 'limited' texts (Tomashevsky, 1998: 26).

Such a perspective 'belongs to a humanist ideology' (Macherey, 1995: 230) assuming a set of final, unified meanings originating in the author, and acknowledged by the reader. These unified meanings, growing directly out of the author's personal, creative and imaginative experience, are often presented in anecdotes, interviews and introductions. Referred to by Williamson (1989) as 'machinery for packaging (Williamson, 1989: 69)', it is argued that such 'parts' obstruct and influence a reader's individual creativeness and interpretation regarding a text, thereby interfering with its 'true concreteness' (Leavis, 1933: 146-150). Jeanette Winterson (1985) for example, in her Introduction in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit says, 'Oranges is an experimental novel (interests are anti-linear), Oranges is a threatening novel (exposing the sanctity of family life), Oranges is a comforting novel (the heroine outside of life) and Oranges an autobiographical novel? (no, not at all, and yes of course)" (Winterson, 1985: xiii-xiv). It is assumed that the reader will read the text in a similar manner or use this information as a guide.

Analysing a text by 'authorial expressivity' alone is problematic for a number of other reasons. Firstly, an author, apart from writing his/her own work, may, according to Eisenstein (1979), be a scribe (writing the works of others), a compiler (adds to other author's work) or a commentator (writing one's own and others) (Eisenstein, 1979: 121-122). An author may also carry a pseudo name or simply none at all (Foucault, 1977: 127). As a result, recent literary criticism has re-considered the text and/or the world, claiming that this 'author-centred' approach to literature 'fails to provide a coherent basis for discussion of the narrative while obstructing the understanding of literature as a whole' (Neale, 1980: 2). According to Williamson (1989), 'no text is authored in the sense of flowing autonomously from a subject's consciousness' (Williamson, 1989: 1). Instead, it is 'a way of organising social roles, creative endeavours, and knowledge about cultural forms' (Williamson, 1989: 1-2) by becoming a product of a structured play of forces, relations and discourses (Caughie, 1981: 1). These forces (institutional), relations (between family, politics, religion and so on), and discourses (femininity, social class, gender for example) (Laurenson and Swingewood, 1972: 12), are (re) distributed through bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages and so on (Barthes, 1981: 39). Genres are one technique used within texts to organise and express all of these and more.

Generally 'genre' means type or kind (Williamson, 1989: 51) or as Neale (1980) refers, 'formula' (Neale, 1980: 2). A more descriptive definition of genre is a 'mode of a narrative system, that constitutes specific variations of the interplay of codes, discursive structures and drives' (Neale, 1980: 48). In other words, the reader will not look for 'hidden meanings', as in the activity of interpretation; the reader will be concerned with various levels and multiplicities of meaning that the text as a system, enjoys (Hawkes, 1977: 105).

Generic theory used to treat the notion of genre as sets of prescriptive norms, or as purely descriptive categories such as thriller, romance, western and so on. For example, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit could be called a romance, comedy, or melodrama. It may also be referred to as a 'mixed-genre' text such as a fantasy/adventure or romance/comedy (Williamson, 1989: 52). This text differs to most in respect to the way it complies within and outside of normative generic frameworks or conventions. It is more controversial than most, and it is this non-conventional character that makes it such an interesting read. To better explain this, examples will be discussed to show how different genres may or may not be portrayed within their given conventions, how they interplay and how they may express the state of the external world.

Romance for example, revolves around love, warmth, compassion, pain and betrayal. Usually the heroine meets someone, falls in love, suffers pain and hardships, only to finish up happy with the one he/she loves. In Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, this genre presents itself as confusing, disjointed and inconclusive, but also a constant source of pain. For example, the relationship between Jess and her mother is constantly strained, filled with denial (Jess's Lesbianism), betrayal (about her biological mother and adoption papers) and desperation (Jess's desire to be loved). Her idea of love, especially for God, is very intense as expressed in this statement - 'I want someone who is fierce and will love me to death and know that love is as strong as death' (Winterson, 1985: 164). Betrayal, as mentioned previously, becomes a continuing theme within the text, as the only one she appears to trust is God (who some might say is only in her imagination, that is, a fantasy). She refers to her mother as a servant of God and as such, 'the servants of God.......by their very nature betray' (Winterson, 1985: 165). Perhaps most importantly, the 'real' world is hidden from her and denied of her. It is replaced with a world of obsession, self-sacrifice, violation and human selfishness. In other words, Jess's search for love appears hopeless which may be an indication that the real world is a complex and harsh place, one in which fairy tales and fantasy flourish.

Such fairy tales and fantasy brings into play other genres such as comedy, fantasy/adventure and even a misconstrued form of erotica. Obsession, self-sacrifice, violation and human selfishness tend to belong within a 'horror' genre (to some, these fit within their conventional ideas of erotica). Horror also suggests fear, hatred, pain, and death. Within this genre, the heroine/hero usually lives, while those inflicting the pain, perish. In Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, horror seems to be everywhere. The exorcism is a perfect example of this. When referring to the film version, Hinds (1992) describes this scene as, 'brutal, shocking, horrifying' and adds, 'if anybody was disturbed by the scene in which the pastor - armed with rope, gag and pulsating neck - straddled the young Jess to exercise the demon of illicit love, then so they should have been' (Hinds, 1992: 164). Jess's desire to learn and discover her true self appears blocked at her every attempt while her lovers; the church and her mother (in the end) appear to find some sort of happiness. From this perspective, the horror of the real world is revealed while implying how power relations exist, that is, the manipulation and deceit by those who have the power and desire to control those less powerful than themselves, be it local, national or global.

As mentioned briefly above, fantasy, comedy and adventure are genres that appear in both the texts discussed. For example, an interesting interruption in Jess's story is the injection of little invented fairy tales. One minute, the story follows the path toward the Promised Land of Jess's mother then it detours to the path leading to the Land of Forbidden Fruit. The novel is filled with ironic use of humour, whether meant to be biting or not. Many incidences within the novel show Jess's sense of humour in relation to her mother for example. Her comments are witty, especially about her mother's 'ability' (as well as Elsie's) to come up with an explanation for every problem that seems out of the ordinary. Such injections may be a way of overcoming issues of domination and control, by appealing to the comical in order to cope. Jess's teacher having a 'problem of vision' (Winterson, 1985: 44) is symbolic of how people choose to ignore that which is obvious to some and not to others. Jess's journey, whether simple or complex, is one of adventure, as is real life.

This particular text provides an interesting view of how genres and their conventions, not only work to construct a text but represent possible social aspects of both the 'real' world and the people in it. Although texts in general are very different, the characters in them may relate to anyone, not just the author. In other words, depending on the reader's knowledge and understanding, each text provides the means with which, as Culler (1977) suggests, 'people arrive at what is called 'reality'' (Culler, 1977: 160). Such realities become recognisable by the reader who interprets generic conventions, whether fixed or not, by 'naturalising' them. To naturalise a textual convention means not only to understand it, but to 'forget' its conventional character, to absorb it into the reading-out process, to incorporate it into one's interpretive net (Chatman, 1978: 49). This interpretive net changes continuously as no thought, idea, or concept is without the construction of, or contamination by, groups of other thoughts, ideas and concepts (Wolfreys and Baker, 1996: 188). Therefore, generic conventions, or as Chatman (1978) puts it, 'a battery of pre-established categories' (Chatman, 1978: 94) are not rigid, they are only guidelines, not law.

The previous discussion has attempted to show how a narrative is not just something you read and put away. It is not something belonging to the author and the author's expressivities alone, for this does not explain its 'concreteness'. Instead, a narrative is filled with meaning about the world, and that meaning is determined by a whole system of constitutive rules that may be broken, re-directed, or changed. What is confusing, more obscure, and less easy to analyse, are those genres that defy already defined generic conventions as in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. These may be thought of as liberating order itself and act as a domain whereby subcultures such as lesbians, discover new orders. In other words, behaviour is not regulated so much as it is created and genres provide the frameworks within which this may be achieved. Jeanette Winterson's (1985) text is filled with genre, some fixed (to a point) and others mixed. This text, like most, confronts certain cultural and social issues such as class and sexuality. Perceived in this manner, any text is worthy of study, offering something, not only to the reader, but the world and whether it is authored or not, makes little difference.