It is now generally considered an established fact that literature and society are closely connected. But what were the conditions that made it possible to attain this insight and how has it developed into the present? The study attempts to answer these questions by tracing the emergence, around 1900, of sociological issues in connection with literature relating to (a) the genesis of a literary >field< and (b) to the correlation between aesthetic and sociological inquiries into the nature of cultural modernism observable in Germany at the time.

Autorentext
Christine Magerski ist Dozentin für neuere deutsche Literatur und Kultur an der Universität Zagreb und Autorin von Veröffentlichungen zur deutschen
Kultur- und Bildungsgeschichte. Ihre Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind die Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, die Wissenschaftsgeschichte sowie die Geschichte der Sozial- und Kulturtheorie.