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

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-APR-94

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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press

By Jill Anne Kowalik. (University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, 114.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 148. $30.

Professor Kowalik explores the interrelation of literary criticism, language, and history in early eighteenth-century German aesthetics. The focal point of her study is Johann Jacob Breitinger's Critische Dichtkunst (1740). The term "historical perspectivism" denotes the resemblances between poesis and historiography. In short, the book breaks down the sharp distinction between poesis and historiography traditionally ascribed to...

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