Mood

Abstract

This text on the keyword “mood” offers an attempt to define that category in the context of poetics. Though the term itself frequently appeared in discussions of literature in the eras of Romanticism and Symbolism, its meaning was then understood more intuitively and arbitrarily and it constituted rather a means of aesthetic evaluation of literary works than a strictly defined concept in the field of literary studies. A new approach to the idea of mood proposed by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and his simultaneous exhortation to examine it within the categories of literary and cultural theory and poetics demands a clear definition of its position among poetics concepts and an effort to define the function in scholarly discourse that could be performed by this category—a traditional one, but read by Gumbrecht in a completely new fashion.