Based on the bibliography of the hermeneutic study ‘A History of Poetics’, provided by Sandra Richter, the choice of the corpus covers twenty historical and systematical representative works ranging from Johann Jakob Engels ‘Poetic’ (1806 as first volume of his ‘Schriften’, originally published in 1783 as ‘Anfangsgründe einer Thorie der Dichtungsarten aus Deutschen Mustern entwickelt’) to Herbert Seidlers ‘Die Dichtung: Wesen – Form – Dasein’ (1959) and thus contains works from the beginnings of scientific poetic until its end resp. transition to literature theory. Representative does hereby mean, that these texts are cited most and been published in many editions.

The definition of the examination period 1770-1960 has two reasons:

1. The initial point at the end of the 18th century marks the turning away from the normative and regulative poetic (prescriptive poetic). Later on, poetics were scientifically descriptive rather than prescriptive works (descriptive poetic).

2. The end – not only of the examination period – marks the transition to literature theory in the 20th century. The result was a creeping end of scientific poetic as a whole.