Culture and Poetics

Author: Tong Qingbing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-02-01
Features: The period covered in this book is exceptionally fruitful in the history of German culture and thought. It encompasses an important literary revival that included works by Lessing, the classical literature of Goethe and Schiller, and the rise of Romanticism. This revival transformed German literature from a pale imitation of foreign styles (primarily French) into an original achievement in the European sense. This period was highly productive in aesthetics and critical theory, including Baumgarten's first attempt to establish aesthetics as a new science ("Aesthetics"), Lessing's famous essay on the difference between poetic art and visual art, the plans by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller for reviving and Hellenizing classicalism, the aesthetic systems of Kant and Hegel, and the theoretical developments in art and aesthetics associated with the German Romantic movement. In other countries—especially Britain and France—these achievements had a profound impact on the theory of art and aesthetics.