In their essays, both Owen and Dimock present persuasive arguments for the malleable, pliable nature of genre.  The implications of this conception are taken up by Jeanette Winterson.  She argues that the norms associated with genre facilitate greater creativity by authors.  Referring to both Orlando and Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she writes that in “either case there is an immediate challenge to genre-boxing but there is to, an invitation to believe.  To accept what will follow as truth and as the kind of truth only possible between people who know each other well… We can be taken in by someone who offers truth with a wink and says ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.” 

The use of genre as a classifying method seems at first, and deceptively, to be a mere practical necessity--an organizing tool of the intellect to make the overly abundant world of phenomena accessible within the limits of perception and analysis. The more one considers genre, however, the more one realizes that the manner in which we make such a world accessible is not passive, rather an active selection informed by cultural imperatives. Inevitably, such selection (and selective omission) leads to categories and hierarchies that point less to the inherent qualities of the object as to human motivations to delimit and exalt certain perceived characteristics.

What struck me was that both readings, though arriving at their destinations by completely different routes (one through the digital age, one through ancient history), managed to depit genre as something fluid from the very begining --no matter what human beings attempt to mold it into. Neither author put on the appearance of believing that genre is (and was) just as simple as a division into epic, lyric, and dramatic.

     When it comes to analyzing literature, genre is a given.  We read books, digest them, and place them into categories, where they lie helplessly until public or cultural opinion scoops them up and plops them down into yet another slot.  As human being we accept genre as something undying and ever-present, something that is the cause of much controversy in the literary world, but it is important to realize that genre is very much man-made.  We have placed this great, categorical burden upon ourselves.