ABSTRACT
Literary history may be seen as challenging literary theory to take up once again the unresolved dispute between the Marxist and formalist schools. The perspective of the aesthetics of reception mediates between passive reception and active understanding, norm-setting experience and new production. The relationship of literature and reader has aesthetic as well as historical implications. The ideal cases of the objective capability of such literary frames of reference are works which, using the artistic standards of the reader, have been formed by conventions of genre, style, or form. Thus a literary work with an unusual aesthetic form can shatter the expectations of its reader and at the same time confront him with a question which cannot be answered by religiously or publicly sanctioned morals.
