SOURCE: Leidner, Alan C., and Karin A. Wurst. “The First Reviews.” In Unpopular Virtues: The Critical Reception of J. M. R. Lenz, pp. 1-19. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Leidner and Wurst survey early criticism of Lenz's work.

The Critical Background

When Der Hofmeister, Lenz's first published drama and the first of his major dramas to be performed (in 1778) appeared in 1774, modern literary criticism was still in its infancy. Although it had been a half century since Joseph Addison called the imagination more germane to the theater than neoclassical rules, and since Jean Baptiste Dubos declared that the artist should move the spectator emotionally, it took time for expressive theories of art to win out over neoclassical tradition. For art was not just art: it was one element in a complex dialogue evolving in moral weeklies and literary journals, a dialogue about the...