Since the 1990s, various »turns« have chased each other around literary criticism. Thus, the »cultural turn«, »performative turn«, »spatial turn«, »iconic turn«, and »philological turn« - to name just a few - have been proclaimed. The volume at hand questions the state of the art of interpretation. What does it mean for the literary scholars to interpret and understand texts according to the »turns« of recent decades? What new paradigms have not worn out, but rather optimized processes of understanding from a present-day perspective? And: are there old paradigms of which a Renaissance appears necessary?