This article demonstrates effective genre attribution methods in historical sources, suggesting that intertextuality and polygenre improve authorship determination.
The subject of the research article is the adaptation of philological categories "intertextuality" (connections between texts) and "polygenre" (genre heterogeneity within a text) as methodological tools of historical science for the analysis of textual sources. The study focuses on how the application of these categories allows for the deconstruction of the "monolithicity" of historical documents (using the example of the memoirs and scientific article by T. E. Lawrence), revealing in them borrowings, insertions from other works, or microtexts with different genre nature (for example, a scientific article within memoirs). The aim of the study is to demonstrate that the use of the proposed categories will enable historians to more accurately determine the authorship of text fragments, reconstruct the history of the source's creation, assess the reliability of information, and identify authorial strategies through the lens of genre conventions. The research employs comparative-textological analysis and genre attribution based on linguistic criteria. The foundation of the methodology is the adaptation of philological concepts of intertextuality (R. Barthes, J. Kristeva) and polygenre (D. K. Karsliyeva, E. A. Andreeva, V. I. Khomyakov). The study offers a systematic adaptation of the philological categories of "intertextuality" and "polygenre" into historical source studies as a new methodological tool. The novelty lies in the following: 1) demonstration, using the genres of memoirs and scientific articles, of the possibility of developing criteria for genre attribution of beyond phrase units (purpose, functions, structure, terminology) for historians; 2) consideration of two types of heterogeneity within sources – insertions from other specific and complete works (using the example of the inclusion of the military-scientific article by T. E. Lawrence in his memoirs) and "organic" polygenre (microtexts of different genre nature, such as a geographical essay in the introduction to the memoirs). The main conclusions are as follows: these categories are effective for deconstructing the "monolithicity" of sources, reconstructing their "archaeology" (sources of fragments, stages of creation), and identifying author's strategies through genre conventions. This allows for a shift from intuitive analysis of the text's attributes to a reflective plane, opening up prospects for reinterpreting historical research.
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Mukhin et al. (2025) studied this question.