The Poetics of Historical Perspectivism: Breitinger's "Critische Dichtkunst" and the Neoclassic Tradition

Public Deposited
Analytics

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Request Version for Screen Reader
Creator
  • Kowalik, Jill Anne
Abstract
  • Jill Kowalik reevaluates J. J. Breitinger's "Critische Dichtkunst" (1740) with regard to a heretofore neglected aspect of aesthetics in the early eighteenth century, namely how poesis and historiography could increasingly come to resemble each other in their assumptions, purposes, and methods of representation. The central argument states that historians of this period began to utilize the concept of historical perspectivism only after its development as an interpretive tool by the aesthetic thinkers of the early Enlightenment. The "Critische Dichtkunst" is examined in terms of three disparate traditions: the modern reception of Aristotle's "Poetics", Horace's "Ars poetica", and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns the model of consciousness proposed by Leibniz that describes the mind as a ceaseless process of historical intellective integration and the German reception of French neoclassical authors, especially Dubos, whose notion of historical probability was radicalized by Breitinger and later appropriated by poets and historians alike.
Date of publication
Subject
DOI
Resource type
  • Book
Rights statement
  • In Copyright
License
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States
Series
  • UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures
Publisher
  • University of North Carolina Press
ISBN
  • 9781469656632
Language
  • English

Relations

Parents:

This work has no parents.

In Collection:

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details 9781469656632_WEB 2020-05-21 Public Download
file details 9781469656632_EPUB 2020-05-21 Public Download