Didactic Poetry and Its Place in Literary History: The Case of Johann Christoph Gottsched and Matija Antun Relković

Abstract

This article analyses 19th-century literary histories and their perceptions of a literary dispute between Leipzig and Zürich from a century before in order to outline the process of formation and the mechanisms working out a stance towards didactic poetry, which was articulated during the period of Romanticism. The main characteristics of this stance are extrapolated from the way in which literary history has handled the didactic poem of Matija Antun Relković "Satir iliti divji čovik." The poem is compared with Johann Christoph Gottsched's manifesto of normative poetics, Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen to show that the didactic poem belongs to a period whose understanding of literature is incompatible with the epistemological demands of modern readings of didactic poetry.