Exceptionally, perhaps, the study does not concentrate on the role of the theatre in the (German) bildungsroman. Instead, a comparative perspective is chosen to elucidate how and why European novelists talk about the theatre. Poetological considerations, such as the function of the theatre for the organization of the narrative, are given just as much attention as issues connected with the history and theory of aesthetic experience in modernism. In short, the concern is to examine the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries in terms of the history of art, society, and the media. As such, the study is a perusal of perception mechanisms that have remained with us to this day.