Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism

This ambitious and original study explores the connections between aesthetic theory and political theory from the era of Romanticism to the twentieth century. David Kaiser traces these ideas through Schiller and Coleridge, Arnold, Mill and Ruskin, to Adorno and Habermas. He analyzes the problems that contemporary literary theory faces in attempting to connect the aesthetic and political spheres, and suggests that we rethink the aesthetic sphere in order to regain that connection.