Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics

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...