Kirjahaku

In this important study, Lesley Sharpe assesses Schiller's development as a dramatist, poet and thinker, and provides detailed discussions of all his major works, including his essays on aesthetics. His works are viewed against the social, political and literary background of the late eighteenth century. Spanning a period from the late 1770s to 1805 they explore the insistent themes of the age - the loss of tradition and authority, the individual's claim to self-expression and the search for stability. While the early works focus on the turbulent individual, Schiller later turns to the great public concerns of the French Revolutionary era - legitimacy and power, the exercise of freedom and the relationship between morality and politics. The aesthetic essays explore the vital role of art in integrating the aesthetic, moral and political realms.

This is the first general study of Friedrich Schiller’s works to appear in English for over forty years. Lesley Sharpe assesses Schiller’s development as a dramatist, poet and thinker, and provides detailed discussions of all his major works, including his essays on aesthetics. His works are viewed against the social, political and literary background of the late eighteenth century. Spanning a period from the late 1770s to 1805 they explore the insistent themes of the age - the loss of tradition and authority, the individual's claim to self-expression and the search for stability. While the early works focus on the turbulent individual, Schiller later turns to the great public concerns of the French Revolutionary era - legitimacy and power, the exercise of freedom, and the relationship between morality and politics. The aesthetic essays explore the vital role of art in integrating the aesthetic, moral and political realms.

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.