A sociohistory of German bourgeois literature from 1770 to 1914, this book traces the sociogenesis of bourgeois divided subjectivity by examining the dialectic of utopian contestation and ideological legitimation as manifested in six canonical literary texts: Lessing's Emilia Galotti, Schiller's The Robbers, Heine's Ideas: The Book Le Grand, Buchner's Woyzeck, Hofmannsthal's Tale of the Cavalry, and Kafka's The Judgement.

Gray asserts that the emancipatory struggle of middle-class literati in Germany was directed not so much against an external class oppressor as it was against the intraideological coercion inherent in bourgeois sociopolitical and economic practice. The book's thesis is that aesthetic innovation in German bourgeois literature was shaped by the simultaneous accommodation with and rebellion against bourgeois instrumentalized reason on the part of the literary intelligentsia.

The texts studied are drawn from three historical "stations," each marked both by intense sociopolitical upheaval and furious creativity in literary aesthetics: the Enlightenment and Sturm und Drang, Young Germany, and the modernism of the Austrian fin de siecle.