Indicating that a text belongs to a certain genre, and determining how this genre operates, is a statement about the society that produced these texts, just as much as it is about literature. This chapter discusses such interactions between society and genre, as well as a society’s change and development. Following is a discussion of authorship and readership in the context of genre, and finally it provides my own definition of genre, as well as expanding Hans Robert Jauss’s “horizon of expectations” to create a sort of “vertigo of expectations” through these texts’ changing context of transmission.