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Poetics in the 19th century had a difficult time instituting itself as a reflexive discipline to rival aesthetics and literary criticism, built on the ruins and loss of credibility of the old rhetorical disciplines, paradoxically so, since a desire for “method” and scientificity was starting to drive all disciplines. Such a discipline seems to start making an appearance in the margins left fallow by the domination of historical approaches to literature : in caricatures, pamphlets, pastiches, parodies of the typologies of “comic” physiologies, trials, private correspondence, diaries, prefaces, drafts.