This essay examines some ‘new media’ practices of the 1990s together with late twentieth-century critical commentaries on computer-mediated communication and electronic textuality. It compares both with discussions of changes in communications technologies and readerships from the turn of the nineteenth century. Based on observations about narrative form—especially the mutual metaphoricity of the nation and the book—in conjunction with the associated qualities of self-consciousness about sociability, historicity, and mediatedness that emerge from this study, the essay proposes an understanding of genre formation as a characteristic, and under-recognized, response to the experience of media change and outlines the possible contributions a more self-conscious theory of genre could make to existing theories of media, mediation, and media succession.