Descriptive poetics is an analytic approach withinliterary studies. While the concept ofpoetics goes back toAristotle, the term "descriptive poetics" refers to an approach which, according toBrian McHale, represents a middle ground between theoretically oriented approaches and analyses of individualworks of literature. David Gorman writes that "Ifcriticism is the study of literary works, poetics is the study of the features of those works, that is, the properties they can share: [...] its topic is any shared or shareable feature of literary works."[1]
To McHale, the purpose of descriptive poetics is to give exhaustive accounts of different kinds of objects which can be a group of texts, theentire production of a single author, a particulargenre, thestyle of a period inliterary history or even specific styles of literature. McHale argues that the approach is not defined by what it examines but by the level ofgeneralization achieved in this form of literary studies.[2] The approach was given a formalized forum in the journalPTL: A Journal of Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature which only had a short run before it was succeeded by the more successful journalPoetics Today.[3] According to literary scholar Uni Margolin, descriptive poetics was a rather prominent form of scholarship in the first half of the 20th century, especially in Germany, but has since "been neglected since 1968 because of its low level of theoretisation".[4]
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