The purpose of this article is to present Stefania Skwarczynska’s genre theory in order to
show its inspirational character for the contemporary genre studies. The scholar’s works,
predeceasing threads of theories enclosed in works of M. Bakchtin, G. Genette, helped
to form the way genres are present in different interpretative methodologies today, for
example in architextual readings of texts, tracing of various genre’s places within cultural
spaces and also of their role as signs of times in which one or another becomes
popular or dominating
