Ancient hermeneutics, which generated allegorical interpretations of fables of the poets and biblical texts, played a significant role in the study literature until the Renaissance, and an interest in literature help to stimulate the foundation of philosophical hermeneutics in German romanticism and after, but philosophical hermeneutics has played little role in literary studies subsequently. Until the mid-twentieth century, literary criticism was primarily evaluative rather than interpretive, but when it made interpretation its goal, it did not draw on the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. A discussion of the nature of literary criticism and of the relationship between hermeneutics and the poetics focuses on this history, with brief treatments of exceptions, such as the work of E. D. Hirsch and H. R. Jauss.