Schiller to Derrida
Idealism in Aesthetics

This is a historical critique of literary theory from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Juliet Sychrava (Author)

9780521131643, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 February 2010

264 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.34 kg

'This is one of the most exciting and stimulating texts in aesthetics that I have read in a long while.' Stephen Houlgate, DePaul University

Schiller to Derrida is a historical critique of literary theory in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Starting with the work of Kant and Schiller, it traces an idealist tradition through nineteenth-century Romantic theory (including Wordsworth and Coleridge) and the New Critics to post-structuralists, notably Derrida. The book argues that these diverse and often apparently radical critics in fact only revise and distort Kant's idealist aesthetics. It shows how this dominant idealism has prejudiced critical opinion against certain non-idealist writers, and takes the example of John Clare as illustration.

Introduction
1. Schiller and the sentimental tradition
2. Myths of romanticism
3. Critics of Clare and Wordsworth
4. Ut pictura poesis
5. Post-Kantians and post-structuralists
6. The peasant poet
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS]