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Friedrich Schiller, the dramatist and poet, greatly influenced the development of aesthetics through his essays. He sums up the eighteenth century while anticipating modern ideas; his notions of the naive and the sentimental, of art as play, and of beauty as semblance, have had a lasting impact on aesthetic speculation. Dr Sharpe's book is the first study devoted to tracing the attempts of successive generations of philosophers and literary critics to expound the works and deal with the problems they present. Surveying Anglo-American as well as German-language criticism, she illuminates the impact of critical and political change on their evaluation.

Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany's foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. The undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love remains the gravitational center of the universe and of human existence, and beyond life and death joy prevails. This collection of cutting-edge essays by some of the world's leading Schiller experts constitutes a milestone in scholarship. It includes in-depth discussions of the writer's major dramatic and poetic works, his essays on aesthetics, and his activities as historian, anthropologist, and physiologist, as well as of his relation to the ancients and of Schiller reception in 20th-century Germany. Contributors: Steven D. Martinson, Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann, Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels, J. M. van der Laan, Rolf-Peter Janz, Lesley Sharpe, Norbert Oellers, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl S. Guthke, Wulf Koepke. Steven D. Martinson is Professor of German at the University of Arizona.

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.

To mark the 200th anniversary of Schiller’s death, leading scholars from Germany, Canada, the UK and the USA have contributed to this volume of commemorative essays. These were first presented at a symposium held at the University of Birmingham in June 2005. The essays collected here shed important new light on Schiller’s standing as a national and transnational figure , both in his own lifetime and in the two hundred years since his death. Issues explored include: aspects of Schiller’s life and work which contributed to the creation of heroic and nationalist myths of the poet during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his activities as man of the theatre and publisher in his own, pre-national context; the (trans-)national dimensions of Schiller’s poetic and dramatic achievement in their contemporary context and with reference to later appropriations of national(ist) elements in his work. The contributions to this volume illuminate Schiller’s achievements as poet, playwright, thinker and historian, and bring acute insights to bear on both the history of his impact in a variety of contexts and his enduring importance as a point of cultural reference.

Given this situation, Professor Pugh's study of the plays' fortunes at the hands of the various schools of German literary scholarship from Schiller's day down to the present is useful both to literary scholars seeking orientation in the field and also to readers with a wider interest in German intellectual traditions."--BOOK JACKET.