In Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography: The Formation of a Discipline at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies.

Uhlig, an associate professor of comparative literature at UC Davis, draws on a variety of European writers to demonstrate how different schools of literary study — rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history — emerged and clashed in the decades around 1800. The text traces current debates in the field to this moment in history, giving context to these controversies. 

Access the book at the University of Pennsylvania Press