The study attempts to reconstruct Goethe's views on aesthetics prior to the period of Weimar classicism. Here we find very early indications of a tendency toward autonomy in his theory of art and literature. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of the literary field, Goethe's paradigmatic theoretical writings are subjected to an intertextual microanalysis and at the same time related both to the immediate circumstances of their genesis and artistic points of reference on the one hand and to European contexts on the other. This provides a broader backdrop against which both the specific and the representative aspects of Goethe's non-systematic aesthetic thinking can be usefully reviewed.