This book will prove insightful to students and scholars interested in German literary, philosophical, and cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.

Exploring theories of the sublime from Neoclassicism to the Post-modern, this study questions the widely-accepted view of the sublime as an aesthetics that glorifies the self.

This study develops a novel interpretation of Schiller's classical aesthetic humanism - «the fountainhead of all later German critical theory» (Wellek) - as a program of normative discipline in Foucault's sense of the term. Schiller's aesthetics establishes and puts to work a number of metaphysical schemata, such as the three-stage figure of origin and return, in order to render its subjects as programmable and as subject to a knowledge that could be strategically deployed to shape and transform them. Nostalgic teleology, (...) the promise of a recovery of nature, wholeness, and community serves to hide the violence of this project of aesthetic education. At its center stands the formation of «the Other Sex», which is analyzed as the truly classical elaboration of a modern «regime of truth.». (shrink)

Fred Beiser, renowned as one of the world's leading historians of German philosophy, presents a brilliant new study of Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), rehabilitating him as a philosopher worthy of serious attention. Beiser shows, in particular, that Schiller's engagement with Kant is far more subtle and rewarding than is often portrayed. Promising to be a landmark in the study of German thought, Schiller as Philosopher will be compulsory reading for any philosopher, historian, or literary scholar engaged with the key developments (...) of this fertile period. (shrink)