Literary history is a grand genre formed through interaction with its own "subject" (literature). It gives a comprehensive narrative synthesis. It has significant authority over the shaping of public past, national and cultural identities and the literary canon. The post-modern historic turn poses new challenges to this genre, such as a reconsideration of its own role in the social discourse, the substitution of omniscient narrative by the polyphony and collages, the redefinition of the ties between the literary work and the cultural context, and the preservation of its own genre identity through the historical analysis of the literariness and the literary field. One possible reformaton of the grande genre is offered by electronic hypertexts.