Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

First published in Germany in 1985, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik was quickly recognized as the most original and comprehensive study to date of a proud critical tradition including such giants as Lessing, Goethe, and Heine. Now translated into English, it will serve as a model for a new approach to literary history in America and elsewhere, one emphasizing the connections of criticism with other public discourse. The editor, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, has provided an introduction and a chapter, "Literary Criticism in the Epoch of Liberalism,"translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Filling in the history of German criticism from the Enlightenment to the present are Klaus L. Berghahn of the University of Wisconsin, "From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism, 1730-1806," translated by John R. Blazek; Jochen Schulte-Sasse, University of Minnesota, "The Concept of Literary Criticism in Romanticism"; Russell A. Berman, Stanford University, "Literary Criticism from Empire to Dictatorship, 1870-1933,"; translated by Simon Srebrny; and Bernhard Zimmerman, University of Tübingen, "Developments in German Literary Criticism from 1933 to the Present," translated by Franz Blaha.

Friedrich Schiller, the dramatist and poet, greatly influenced the development of aesthetics through his essays. He sums up the eighteenth century while anticipating modern ideas; his notions of the naive and the sentimental, of art as play, and of beauty as semblance, have had a lasting impact on aesthetic speculation. Dr Sharpe's book is the first study devoted to tracing the attempts of successive generations of philosophers and literary critics to expound the works and deal with the problems they present. Surveying Anglo-American as well as German-language criticism, she illuminates the impact of critical and political change on their evaluation.