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

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 ...