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1. Institutions and genres 1.1. Principles of lemmatization The distinction between different literary genres as specific forms of poetic expression is already found in the  Poetics  of Aristotle. The increasing criticism incurred by normative claims of genre definition, from the 18th century at the latest, and the subsequent acknowledgement that genres are phenomena subject to historical change, and hence fluid, have not diminished their significance in the classification of literary forms. On the contrary: the m…

1. BasicsLiterary theory is a form of communication about literature, itself subject to historical determinants. It defines in each case what can be called “literature”; it also enables thoughtful observations on human self-interpretation in literature [27. 14]. At the beginning of the early modern period, there was no independent literary theory. Instead we find thoughts on literary theory in the context of other forms of discourse (see 3. below). Ever since antiquity, positions regarding literary theory have been taken in phi…