A genre-theory approach to the website: some preliminary considerations

The chapter takes its move from the consideration that despite beng often taken for granted in studies of Web genres, the website as a construct seems to have been given relatively little consideration (with the important exception of seminal work by Lemke) as an object of serious investigation. Reviewing recent development in genre studies both from a genre-theoretical perspective and from a system science perspective, the study attempts to provide a definition of the website capable of capturing both its self-contained (albeit open-ended) nature, and its function as a "container" of multiple independent genres. Based on this, the website can be conceived as a rhetorical interface enabling access to multiple interrelated genres which jointly build a network featuring dense intertextual references, and in which recontextualization processes play a key role.