WERTHER'S EXPLOSIVE EFFECT, wrote Goethe thirty-eight years after the fact, was a matter of timing: at this particular point in history, a disaffected but inarticulate younger generation suddenly found its concerns expressed (HA 9: 589–90). As Peter Hohendahl reports, the novel uncovered a rift between the adherents of the optimistic-sentimental doctrine of virtue and the exponents of Weltschmerz (world-weariness; 1977, 81). The novel's appearance coincided with another less dramatic but nevertheless significant schism that marked the tail end of a profound paradigm shift in German literary criticism. Pre-Enlightenment critics had assessed a work's literary value on the basis of classical models, invoking what were considered timeless and immutable rhetorical prescriptions that conformed to courtly expectations. Wit and power of expression were of course crucial ingredients, but these qualities, too, had to match the fixed standards of cultivated learning. That way, a literary work exemplified its author's erudition and inventiveness; it also reflected these qualities back onto the author's patron. Readers, too, in appreciating a work appropriately, were giving public witness to their own refinement and good breeding.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, German critics gradually developed a new notion of criticism's purpose. Many of the former desiderata remained, but they received a radically new basis: the authority of tradition was now replaced by an inductively defined efficacy. The new theories might still give traditional poetics the benefit of the doubt, but even established judgments ultimately had to withstand the scrutiny of reason.