The author discusses theories from antiquity to the 18th century. By applying both a systematic and a historical approach,her examination unveils the preconditions in cultural and intellectual history as well as the validity conditions for an aesthetic concept of truth. She reconstructs the philosophico-theological appropriation and transformation of the concept of mimesis, and also examines the debateon the status of poetry, imagination, and fiction with a view to a specific aesthetic mode of truth and knowledge.