Puzzled by generics and enums

I had to write a method which, given an Enum class, returned the set of values. First signature attempt:

public Set<Enum<?>> getValuesForEnum(Class<Enum<?>> klass);

Unfortunately this doesn’t work. When you try to invoke this method you got the error:

getValuesForEnum() can't be applied to "name.of.the.Enum"

Let’s say we have an enum named com.example.MyEnum. The compiler complains because MyEnum.class is not a subtype of Class<Enum<?>>. Can you spot the error? Nested type parameters are always tricky to deal with. In this case I had to perform the following reasoning:

A<Y> is a subtype of A<X> if … well this never happens! For the subtype relationship to exist, wildcard must come into play, and there are no wildcards here. Except, well, there is a wildcard indeed: Enum<?>! Unfortunately it’s in the wrong place. We have:

• Class<Enum<?>>

• Class<MyEnum>

To fix this problem the signature needs to be:

public Set<Enum<?>> getValuesForEnum( Class<? extends Enum<?>> klass);

Generics are invariant in Java: a List<String> can’t be used where a List<Object> is expected, regardless of the subtype relation between String and Object. It’s not different in this case: just that we don’t have String and Object, but Enum<?> and Enum<MyEnum>. There exists a subtype relation between the two arguments, but it’s irrelevant because our X is Enum<?>, so it’s not a wildcard.

What puzzled me is that it’s a generic type and the type argument happens to be a wildcard.