Short answers, pulled from the story.
The concept of genre in Western history traces back to Plato and Aristotle. Plato divided literature into poetry, drama, and prose, while Aristotle later revised that system by introducing criteria of the object imitated and the medium of presentation, producing four classical genres: tragedy, epic, comedy, and parody.
Aristotle revised Plato's genre system by eliminating pure narrative as a viable mode and adding two criteria: the object to be imitated, whether superior or inferior, and the medium of presentation, whether words, gestures, or verse. This produced four classical genres: tragedy, epic, comedy, and parody.
The hierarchy of genres in visual art ranked painting types from highest to lowest: history painting, portrait painting, genre painting, landscape and cityscape, animal painting, and still life. The hierarchy was strongest in France, where it was associated with the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture, and was based on a distinction between art that rendered universal essences and art that merely copied appearances.
Mikhail Bakhtin defined genre through the concept of speech genres, which he described as modes of speaking or writing that people learn to mimic, weave together, and manipulate. His examples included the formal letter, the grocery list, the university lecture, and the personal anecdote. For Bakhtin, genres are socially specified and defined, often informally, by a particular culture or community.
A microgenre is a highly specialized, narrow classification of a cultural practice. The term came into usage in the 21st century and most commonly refers to music. It is also associated with the hyper-specific recommendation categories used by digital streaming platforms such as Netflix.
Carolyn Miller argued that genres are best understood as typified rhetorical actions rather than types of texts. Drawing on Lloyd Bitzer's concept of rhetorical situation and Alfred Schutz's concept of typification, she reasoned that recurring rhetorical problems produce recurring responses, and those responses become socially constructed as recognizable types called genres.