The essays in this book investigate the complex and often contradictory relationships between aesthetics and modernity from the late Enlightenment in the 1790s to the Frankfurt School in the 1960s and engage with the classic German tradition of socio-cultural and aesthetic theory that extends from Friedrich Schiller to Theodor W. Adorno. While contemporary discussions in aesthetics are often dominated by abstract philosophical approaches, this book embeds aesthetic theory in broader social and cultural contexts and considers a wide range of artistic practices in literature, drama, music and visual arts. Contributions include research on Schiller¿s writings and his work in relation to moral sentimentalism, Romantic aesthetics, Friedrich Schlegel, Beethoven, Huizinga and Greenberg; philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Heidegger and Adorno; and thematic approaches to Darwinism and Naturalism, modern tragedy, postmodern realism and philosophical anthropology from the eighteenth century to the present day. This book is based on papers given at an international symposium held under the auspices of the University of Nottingham at the Institute of German and Romance Studies, London, in September 2009.

Jerome Carroll is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham, where he specialises in German history of ideas, aesthetics and modern German theatre. His publications include Art at the Limits of Perception: The Aesthetic Theory of Wolfgang Welsch (2006) and he is currently working on the German tradition of philosophical anthropology from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
Steve Giles is Emeritus Professor of German Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on modernism and modernity in cultural theory and on Bertolt Brecht. His most recent book is a translation and edition of Brecht¿s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (2007) and he is currently working on two new editions of Brecht¿s theoretical writings.
Maike Oergel is Associate Professor in German at the University of Nottingham, and works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-German intellectual and literary relations and the intellectual landscape of the Goethezeit. She recently published Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770-1815 (2006) and is currently researching the impact of political paranoia on cultural transfer and exchange between Germany and Britain around 1800.

Contents: Jerome Carroll: Introduction - Michael Bell: Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the Emergence of the Aesthetic - Gustav Frank: The Invisible Hand: Schiller's Media Aesthetics of Modernity - Maike Oergel: The Aesthetics of Historicity: Dialectical Dynamics in Schiller's and Friedrich Schlegel's Concepts of the Art of Modernity - Robert Leventhal: The Aesthetics of the Case-History: Schiller's Juridical-Psychological Contribution - James Parsons: The Musical Poetics of Modernity: The Choral Finale of Beethoven and Schiller's Ninth - Norman Kasper: Schiller's Concept of Innocence in
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry
and the Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic of the 'Innocent Eye' - Marie-Christin Wilm: Huizinga's and Schiller's Theories of Freedom as the Foundation of Their Concepts of Play - Randall K. van Schepen: Two Hundred Years of Aesthetic Modernism: Criticism, Abstraction and Revolution in Schiller and Greenberg - Jerome Carroll: Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and Subjectivity from Kant to Charles Taylor - Sebastian Hüsch: From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage: Søren Kierkegaard's Critique of Modernity - Nicholas Saul: The Dark Side of Modernity: Wilhelm Bölsche, Darwinism, Evolutionary Aesthetics and Spiritualism - Bram Mertens:
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism
: Walter Benjamin's Epistemological Exercise Book - Steve Giles: Realism after Modernism: Representation and Modernity in Brecht, Lukács and Adorno - Martin Travers: 'Ek-Stasis': Away from a Theory of the Lyrical Subject in Adorno and Heidegger - Eric S. Nelson: Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno - Martin Swales: Tragedy and the Aesthetic Dialectic.