ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century marked the emergence of literature’s philosophical importance in several crucial new ways. In the wake of post-Kantian developments in both romantic and Idealist thought occurring at the end of the eighteenth century, literature emerged (in the words of Hegel and others) as “art itself,” “art par excellence”—not simply one genre of art among many (or, for that matter a form of discourse removed from comparison with other artistic genres), but the epitome of artistic experience. Perhaps even more strikingly, given the literary output of the century, these new philosophical construals of literature more than met their match—were in fact in many ways overtaken by the artistic development of new forms which owed their origins to the eighteenth century but their development to the nineteenth. In particular, the novel, which until the late eighteenth century had been written in a primarily epistolary form, came to acquire the sprawling and narrative form associated with many of the great nineteenth-century Russian, French, and English novels and raised new questions about the relation between literature and a rapidly changing social and political world.
