Die Buchreihe Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte deckt das gesamte Spektrum der germanistischen Literaturforschung ab und umfasst Monographien und Sammelbände über einzelne Epochen vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Sie versammelt Beiträge zur Erklärung zentraler Begriffe der Literaturgeschichte, zu einzelnen Autoren und Werken.

In Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831), the deeply unsettling experiences of crisis in the period of revolution and war around 1800 cemented the conviction of a utopian potential inherent in the period of upheaval he was living through. In view of his deeply pessimistic analyses of current events, this conviction comes as a major surprise and calls for explication and clarification with reference to selected texts by Arnim and to contemporaneous semantics. The approach is necessarily a dual one: a diachronic analysis is required to do justice to Arnim's aesthetic adaptation of reality, and also as a supplement to the close analysis of the individual texts.