Literary Conclusions

A conclusion, as this study frames it, is never a single moment but the end result of a longer development, and the form an ending takes carries a history of its own. The book offers a new way of understanding how literary endings were conceived in the eighteenth century, both in imaginative writing and in the thought of the period. It argues that the new kinds of endings that appear around 1800 cannot be separated from the history of philosophical and scientific ideas.

Oliver Simons looks closely at Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist. He traces how Lessing's endings relate to the forms of logical inference of his time. In Goethe's work, he shows, narrative closure is held back by a force of life that could not be governed, a force that scientists of the day were debating. Kleist, by contrast, treats literary genres as ways of reasoning, and Simons contends that Kleist's endings mark the beginning of modernism.

The close readings of these three writers are supported by discussions of Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Together they build a theory of conclusions that rethinks the accepted histories of literary genres and forms.