The eighteenth century plays a secondary role in Magris’ research. His major work on the topic is his 1968 monograph on Wilhelm Heinse; the fact that he has published relatively little on the 1700s comes as even more as a surprise when one thinks of how the paradigm of totality, which strongly sustained his studies on the early twentieth century, is rooted in the German Enlightenment. The present article identifies Magris’ work on Heinse as a major influence on the redefinition of eighteenth-century German literature, which was of great interest in Italian academia in the 1960s, and places his renewed understanding of the German Enlightenment at the core of the radical methodological changes taking place at the time within German Studies in Italy.
