literaturwissenschaftliche

Literaturwissenschaftliche is an adjective form used to describe matters related to the Literaturwissenschaft, the academic study of literature as a textual and cultural practice. The corresponding noun is Literaturwissenschaft (literary studies). In scholarly work the term appears in phrases such as literaturwissenschaftliche Analyse, literaturwissenschaftliche Theorie or literaturwissenschaftliche Methoden, indicating a methodological or theoretical orientation rather than a creative one.

The field investigates literature in its historical contexts, formal properties, and cultural functions. Its scope includes textual analysis and interpretation, genre and form, narrative techniques, intertextuality, reception history, authorial and editorial questions, and the relations between literature and society. Scholarly work often combines approaches from philology, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies, and increasingly from digital humanities, such as digital editions, computational text analysis, and data-driven scholarship. Methods range from close reading and philological criticism to theoretical frameworks like narratology, semiotics, reception aesthetics, and post-structuralist or postcolonial theory.

Historically, Literaturwissenschaft developed out of philology and historical-critical methods in German-speaking countries and evolved through various theoretical epochs in the 20th century, including structuralism, formalism, and later reader-oriented and interdisciplinary approaches. In contemporary academia it is typically housed within Germanistik, Anglistik, Romanistik, and related disciplines, often with cross-disciplinary collaborations across cultural studies, media studies, and humanities computing.

A common point of clarification is that literaturwissenschaftliche refers to scholarly study and analysis, not to creative writing or the aesthetic quality of something being “literarisch” in a literary sense.