Since the 1980s, critics like Stuart Curran, Jacques Derrida, and Tzvetan Todorov have stated in various ways and without qualification that genre “is the driving force of … all literary history” – that “there is no genreless text.” This book does not seek to oppose such assertions so much as to explore their less-acknowledged corollary: that generic classification also depends upon the readers, publishers, and critics who ultimately determine a text's identity and value. The interplay between writers and readers drives not only Bourdieu's sense of canon formation and Derrida's final caution concerning “participation” and “belonging,” but also Fredric Jameson's definition of genre as a “social contract” occurring between any “writer and a specific reading public.”