Die Konstituierung des literarischen Feldes in Deutschland nach 1871

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.