Peter Szondi is widely regarded as being among the most distinguished postwar literary critics. This first English edition of one of his most lucid andinteresting series of lectures, translated by Martha Woodmansee and with aforeward by Joel Weinsheimer, opens up his work in hermeneutics forEnglish-speaking readers. The question of what is involved in understanding a text occupied biblical and legal scholars long before it became a concern of literary critics. Peter Szondi here traces the development of hermeneutics through examination ofthe work of eighteenth-century German scholars. Ordinarily treated only asprefigurations of Schleiermacher, the work of Enlightenment theorists JohannMartin Chladenius, Georg Friedrich Meier, and Friedrich Ast yields valuableinsight into the "material theory" of interpretation - an epistemology of understanding on which a practical interpretive methodology might be built.