Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography

"In this book, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies. Most histories of the early years of the field search for unifying origins of literature as a discipline and object of study. Turning to the decades around 1800, Uhlig reveals that the inception of the literary field was instead defined by intellectual diversity and contestation. He draws on an array of European writers to show how three schools of literary study-rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history-emerged and clashed during this time, offering near-contemporaneous, yet divergent, visions of how to understand literature. Rhetoric and poetics thwarted criticism, to different ends, while literary historiography proved institutionally reassuring, yet less useful as a tool for textual understanding. This book traces current debates in literary studies back to this formative moment, serving as a guide to past and present controversies"--