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Although literary critics continue to make programmatic claims about not only describing but also explaining literary change, and numerous textbooks and individual studies in literary history insinuate or claim to explain literary change, explanations of literary change are as of yet insufficiently reflected in the field’s methodology. Is it at all possible to provide explanations in literary history, where no strict laws have been discovered yet? If yes, what do these explanations look like and in which circumstances are they valid? Understanding literary change as the variance in a specific genre’s instantiation over time, this paper works from the point of departure of explanatory pluralism, the assumption that scientific explanations are to a certain degree discipline-specific and that various different types of explanations exist. The paper aims at an interpenetration of theory and practice and therefore analyzes different types of explanations through a concrete example of literary change. In particular, it focuses on the boom of fictional essay writing that occurred during the first third of the 20th century in German-speaking countries, thus analyzing the two trends of the fictionalization of the essay and the insertion of essayistic passages into fictional texts (e. g., the essayistic novel). The paper examines causal, statistical, intentional, functional, teleological and structur­al explanations for this literary change.

journal of literary theory

Lässt sich literarischer Wandel erklären? Struktur, Gültigkeitsbedingungen und Reichweite verschiedener Erklärungstypen in der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung