The authors of early literary modernism directed their attention at the so-called 'neglected' literary figures of the past, their works and their personal fates. Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is one of the writers emphatically rediscovered in this way around 1880. The present study examines the little discussed but very real phenomenon of 'author renaissances' with reference to Kleist and analyzes it from the dual perspective of social history and the history of evaluation. The undiminished impact of the 'Kleist myth' can thus be (partly) identified as the result of efforts largely undertaken by other writers to replace the established canon of German literature by a counter-canon of their own.