Letternkultur

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The monograph describes the opposition to scholarly erudition and the critique of hidebound academicism in the period from the Renaissance to the late Enlightenment. The , overthrow' of the humanist, rhetorical tradition of scholarship and literature born of the spirit of mathematics and the natural sciences is paralleled by a reorganization of social structure taking the academic scholar out of his splendid isolation and integrating him into the concerns and demands of the State. Satires on academicism and ivory-tower erudition in the early Age of the Enlightenment form the transition to a discussion of the way in which opposition to other-wordly scholarship, the critique of academicism and the reform movement affected the development of literature in German - a process culminating in the Volkspoesie program (Bürger, Herder). The description of this process is based entirely on primary sources and thus closes a gap existing hitherto in recent literary historiography on the period between 1600 and 1780.