Genre Conventions and Genre-Bending

Genre as an intertextual contract

A genre is a recognized category of text defined by shared conventions of form, content, and purpose — the sonnet, the eulogy, the horror film, the recipe, the dystopian novel. Genre is deeply intertextual: when a text signals its genre, it points to every other text of that type the reader has encountered. That shared history sets up expectations. A recipe promises a list of ingredients and numbered steps; a fairy tale promises "once upon a time" and a moral. Genre is, in effect, a contract between writer and reader about how a text should be read.

These conventions are not arbitrary rules but accumulated habits that texts inherit from one another. Each new eulogy learns from the eulogies before it. This is why genre belongs to the study of intertextualit