In a book of rare breadth of vision, Benjamin Bennett offers a new interpretation of the eighteenth century. Undertaking nuanced re-evaluations of Goethe, Herder, Holderlin, Kleist, Lessing, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Kant, as well as many other poets and philosophers, Bennett seeks to trace the process by which modernity was formed in eighteenth-century German thought. The particular importance of German literature, he maintains, lies neither in its content nor in anything that might be termed style or spirit. Rather, its significance rests primarily on the radically subversive irony of its poetic discourse. - Jacket flap.