Genres classify and order the textual world and have allowed us to talk economically about it at least since Aristotle’s Poetics. They do not exist a priori, but in the texts themselves and in the interpreters’ heads. They are communicative constructs which depend upon family resemblances or structural homologies between a number of texts. What makes them so interesting as an object of analysis is that they have limited life-spans (Fowler 1987). These-while also following an internal logic of the evolution of literary forms and of the devolution from genre to mode-seem to often correspond to long-term dispositions in societies, refl ecting on social structures, communal vs. individualized concepts of interaction, ontological beliefs, forms of self-fashioning, and-especially in satires, parodies and utopian forms of literature-on shortcomings and tensions within a given society. This volume aims to fi nd out how postcolonial texts have determined the evolution or emergence of specifi c formal innovations in narrative genres.