German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe

This anthology, part of a three-volume series of which the other two volumes are already available, charts the emergence of aesthetics in Germany in the latter half of the eighteenth century as a distinct discipline emancipated from French domination. The unifying theme of the volume is classicism: Winckelmann’s neo-classicism was based on a profound knowledge of the visual art of Greece and Rome; Lessing’s Laocoon extended Winckelmann’s principles to literature; Herder and Schiller, by contrast, went on to define and defend modern post-classical works of art as distinct but equally justified cultural achievements, while Hamann’s attack on rational poetics together with the young Herder’s pre-Romanticism anticipated central doctrines of the Romantic movement proper; the final essay is Goethe’s study of Winckelmann.