Genre defines the horizon of possible meaning for individual utterances

Evidence

What happens, for example, to Indian narrative traditions in the nineteenth century when the idea of companionate marriage is introduced, as a necessary form of the household in bourgeois society, across regions and languages, into the imaginative universe and the narrative structures of the newly emergent, modern Third Estate? We need to assemble these genealogies of genres, as well as their sociology, not for any formalistic reasons but because the genre often serves as the very horizon which defines the general semantic field, the presumptions of belief systems, the politics of transgression and containment, and the very possibilities of what are called the aesthetic effects of individual utterances, as well as of authors and œuvres. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 498

Categorization

• QUESTION: The companionate-marriage prompt is a genuinely open research question worth chasing — how the bourgeois household norm reshaped Indian narrative across languages.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the arrival of companionate marriage as a narrative premise changed what stories could be told across multiple Indian languages at once.
• XREF: connects to: Intertextuality requires prior linguistic autonomy rather than fusion — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 620