Johann Elias Schlegel's writing for the theatre always pairs up with theoretical reflection. In his essays, Schlegel often takes an original stance with respect to his background as a member of the Gottsched circle. At no time does he ever set aside the mimetic principle; instead, he deploys it on behalf of an aesthetic of affects firmly anchored to a lucid understanding of the political and social situation surrounding the reception of his work. This study mainly focuses on how this intertwining finds expression in his essays and in his major tragedy Canut (1746).
La collana di traduzioni dal tedesco apparsa presso l'editore milanese Silvestri si inserisce in un programma più ampio e assai eterogeneo di pubblicazioni da culture e letterature europee. La centralità del tedesco, in questo contesto, si spiega con il consolidamento della presa esercitata dal governo absburgico sulla vita sociale e culturale dei territori italiani soggetti al suo controllo politico. La "Biblioteca" coltiva una concezione del sapere allargata al campo della filosofia e della tecnica. In ambito letterario prevale una concezione classicistica alimentata dai tradizionali riferimenti (Gessner e Sulzer), anche se la collana ospita traduzioni di opere di Goethe e Schiller.
In his essay Bilse und ich (1905) Thomas Mann, who would utilize the literary essay repeatedly to clarify fundamental aspects of his own poetry, makes his first attempt at working out in a systematic manner the supporting principles for his personal conception of writing. The opportunity presents itself with a trial regarding giving offence, in which The Buddenbrooks (1901) was compared by the public prosecutor to works by Fritz Oswald Bilse, a soldier, who, some time previously, had gained a certain notoriety for publishing a roman à clef in which unpleasant events taking place in the military unit where he was serving, had been revealed. Rejecting this comparison, Mann reflects on certain paradigms conventionally associated with the sphere of aesthetic creativity, discussing critically the nexus between invention and narrative effectiveness.
The category of biopoetics constitutes an ulterior development of what is known as the 'anthropological turn', which, from the mid-1980s onwards, profoundly modified the face of the humanistic disciplines. Biopoetics finds its niche at the junction between two methodological orientations focusing on clarifying the relationship between literary invention and the sphere of bios in a mainly cognitivist perspective (the evolutionistic aesthetic and the neurological interpretation of processes of aesthetic reception); biopoetics can be defined in terms of a meta-discourse that is required to hold together the forms in which bios has found its structuring in: the poetics of authors, the rhetoric that presides over fictional representation of bios in literary works and the way in which processes of aesthetic response are regulated by anthropological constants. The article aims to adopt this conceptual apparatus in its analysis of Emilia Galotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. A traditional and now dated political interpretation of this tragedy saw in the character of Emilia the exponent of bourgeois opposition to the caprices and immorality of the feudal aristocracy. This resistance had no real space in which it could be exercised pragmatically and was therefore doomed to extinguish itself in a pure and simple spiritual testimony, culminating in the (self)-destructive gestures of Emilia and Odoardo Galotti. In line with the hypotheses of eighteenth-century anthropology and, above all, Lessing's theories regarding drama, a biopoetic reading of the work should, on the other hand, draw attention to the aspects of unilaterality and imbalance in Emilia's character, to the absence, in her upbringing, of 'gymnastics' of passion geared towards reinforcing her emotional 'fitness' ('fitness' is a fundamental category in evolutionistic aesthetics). A reading of this nature would also conclude by placing the character of the Prince of Guastalla in a different light; he would look like the carrier of a notion of "fitness" based around premises typical of absolutist culture, such as 'sprezzatura' and décence, which, however, never reach the point of mitigating his personal inclination towards excess and loss of control
Both as essay writer and poet Ludwig Rubiner (1881-1920) focuses on art as a revolutionary practice. He conceives critical understanding of reality as a first step in a radical change of social conditions, which can be seen as the result of an artist's specific attitude in evoking new worlds. This implies that only a non-realistic art can be politically successful, because itrefersto a future horizonwithoutrestricting itselfto describing the politicalsituation ofthe time. In this paper, I analyze Rubiner's strongly utopic art concept involving some typical categories of expressionistic literature like "Geist", "Gemeinschaft", "Katastrophe".
Walser's play Eiche und Angora (1962) deals with the persistence of totalitarianism-oriented mental structures after the Second World War and the collapse of the Nazi regime. Walser represents political history as strongly opposed to the private sphere of ordinary people. Adjustment to the post-war situation of the Bundesrepublik and continuity with the historical past are seen by Walser as equivalent forms of self-defense against the inhuman attitude of political power.
