Whenever we speak of genres, we usually mean stable categories like opera, the novel or the Western. However from the unity and stability of genres, dangers grow out of two historical forces: on the one hand, cultural evolution can move past them and make them obsolete. On the other hand, academic classifications of aesthetic manifestations are not immutable. Since they focus on the marginal, peripheral and precarious, the essays in this collection throw new light on genres, their conceptualization and their evolution. With this, the precarious moves into view, not just the precarity of »minor« genres, but the precarity of the concept of genre as such.