Abstract
Literary histories constitute a species of modern discourse that emerged in Early Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century as an indispensable element of professionalizing literary studies. Although the rise of organic theories of literature and culture is often associated with Romanticism and Samuel Coleridge in particular, it has not been sufficiently understood how, specifically, romantic historiography has profited from the clash of biological theories in the second half of the eighteenth century. In response to concentrated and prolonged twentieth-century attacks on the organicist assumptions of literary histories, some recent publications have attempted to abandon the traditional principles.