The history of modern literary theory begins in Germany with Johann Christoph Gottsched's Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (An Essay in Critical Poetics, 1730), a poetics that is novel in spite of itself. Introduced by a translation and commentary on Horace's De Arte Poetica, the first, general part of the poetics contains doctrines still indebted to the neoclassical tradition. But Gottsched's views on the theory of genres, the concept of taste, and on the role of the critic all point towards an imminent break with this tradition. The time between 1730 and 1751, when the fourth edition of the Critische Dichtkunst appeared and when Lessing made his debut as a literary critic, was a time of transformation, during which literary discourse was still dominated by the old concepts while new approaches were not yet strong enough to transform the old into something explicitly new. René Wellek, from a twentieth-century perspective, proposes as a meaningful starting-point for the history of modern literary theory the middle of the eighteenth century. This perspective is still generally accepted, but it requires some qualification in the case of Germany, where change was slow in coming. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which Perrault had started in France in 1687, finally decided in favour of the Moderns.

The fact that German theory lived so long under the spell of antiquity and neo-classicism had much to do with the miserable state of literary life in Germany. As late as 1795 Goethe complained about the backwardness of Germany's literary conditions which did not allow a national author to emerge.