ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century marked the emergence of literature's philosophical importance in several crucial new ways. The different interests in poetry taken by Hegel and Mill generate differing histories of literature, both on the level of society and the individual character that is drawn to literature: for Hegel, phylogenetically speaking, poetry is somehow more original or primal within the development of the human race. Although certainly not all literary critics have approached their field with an eye for how literature fits within a larger theory of art, recent work within analytic philosophy of literature has placed a useful emphasis on doing so—and hence on seeing how literature as a distinct genre connects with other artistic genres in a broader theory of aesthetics. Most of the prominent treatments of genre in the early part of the nineteenth century still worked within a set of assumptions that had largely been inherited from the eighteenth century.
