Beautiful sciences

Schöne Wissenschaft is the German word order of the middle 18th century for the " belles lettres ," the area from which today's fiction emerged .

In the middle and late 18th century, the term field encompassed all educational objects that were not science (“ literature ”, the “lettres”) in the narrower sense, but rather wanted to be enjoyed and appreciated with taste and understanding of the “ art ” of human invention contained therein .

In the middle of the 18th century, the word replaced the word " gallant sciences", which appeared in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as the first German translation for the "belles lettres". Later, there was talk of " beautiful literature ", which, however, already a conceptual narrowing of the national literature of dramas , poems and novels took place. In this process, conceptual cohesion lost its meaning.

See also

• Gallant novel

literature

• W. Strube, “The history of the term 'beautiful sciences'”, Archive for Conceptual History (1990).
• Rainer Rosenberg: “A confused story. Preliminary considerations for a biography of the concept of literature ”, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik , 77 (1990), 36–65.
• Olaf Simons: Marteaus Europa or the novel before it became literature (Amsterdam, 2001), pp. 85–94.