Answer by Jonathan for Create instance of generic type in Java?

Here's an implementation of createContents that uses TypeTools (which I authored) to resolve the raw class represented by E:

E createContents() throws Exception {  return TypeTools.resolveRawArgument(SomeContainer.class, getClass()).newInstance();}

This approach only works if SomeContainer is subclassed so the actual value of E is captured in a type definition:

class SomeStringContainer extends SomeContainer<String>

Otherwise the value of E is erased at runtime and is not recoverable.