The idea of encyclopedia is central to the development of the sciences in modernity. It's claim is to embrace and to represent all phenomena of nature, history and culture in a formal totality. Yet what this means in concreto, changes strongly in different models of encyclopedia up to the present day: Topical and combinatorial models were replaced in the 17th century by rational systems. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these again were exchanged for encyclopedic dictionaries, which in turn got substituted in the last decades by nonlinear digital encyclopedias like the Wikipedia. In the seminary, we will investigate these models of encyclopedia in their scientific claim as well as in their essential and noticeable formal aspects. This in turn can not be understood only on an epistemological level; it goes also together with aesthetical and poetological aspects. It is no coincidence therefore that literary genres like the novel took over forms and functions of the encyclopedia.