Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics

This 2002 volume offers translations of major works of classic and romantic German aesthetics.

J. M. Bernstein (Edited by)

9780521001113, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 12 December 2002

356 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.56 kg

This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein traces the development of aesthetics from its still rationalist and mimetic construction in Lessing, through the optimistic construal of art and/or beauty as the appearance of human freedom in the work of Schiller, to Hölderlin's darker vision of art as the memory of a lost unity, and the variations of that theme - of an impossible striving after the lost ideal - which are found in the work of Schlegel and Novalis.

Hamann: Aesthetica in nuce
Lessing: Laöcoon
Moritz: On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful
Schiller: Kallias Letters
Hölderlin: Oldest Program for a System of German Idealism
Letter to Hegel
Being Judgement Possibility
The Significance of Tragedy
Remarks on Oedipus
Novalis: From Miscellaneous Remarks
Monologue
Dialogues
On Goethe
Studies in the Visual Arts
Schlegel: From 'Critical Fragments'
From 'Athenaeum Fragments'
From 'Ideas'
On Goethe's Meister
Letter about the Novel
On Incomprehensibility.

Subject Areas: Philosophy [HP]