This monograph examines the practice of argumentation in literary studies. The central question is: How do interpreters make their claims about literary texts plausible? The aim is to comprehensively reconstruct, describe the relevant strategies and to offer perspectives for their explanation. This goal can only be achieved in an interdisciplinary way and by combining qualitative and quantitative analyses. To this end, current praxeological, argumentation-analytical and linguistic approaches are integrated. On this basis, an analytical method is developed and used to analyse a corpus of interpretations from the years 1995 to 2015. The results provide, for the first time, broad and systematic insights into plausibilisation strategies in literary studies. The monograph is thus aimed at literary scholars interested in the practice of their discipline, as well as at representatives of other disciplines who study argumentation.