Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics (Paperback)

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.