Nietzsche's Aesthetic Solution to the Problem of Epigonism in the Nineteenth Century

Summary

For almost two generations, the age following Goethe's death in 1832 has been regarded as the Period of Epigones. Large revolutions and a general renewal, a reestablished German empire and a certain maturity in some of the intellectual developments within that period were necessary before this view, according to which all recent poetic work and all attempts in that field had been nothing but an echo and a reimagining of classical forms and contents taken from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, could be widely replaced by a different conviction and some better judgment.

Literary historian Adolf Stern's reflection, which begins his essay “Germany's Literature from Goethe's Death to the Present” (1885), gives a precise description of the ambivalence embodied in the category of “epigonality.” The central place that this concept was given in literary criticism of the nineteenth century is due to a form of prejudice, for the “conviction” that literature post-Goethe must be epigonic is at best a superficial, a dubious “judgment.” This follows from the foundations on which such an assessment rests, which in turn depends upon an intellectual history that would explain the term “Period of Epigones” and specifies its use in the nineteenth century. For a long time, the concept was related to the idea that an age of cultural bloom is being followed by an epigonic period, an idea which reaches back to Karl Leberecht Immermann's original coining of the term.