Den Flug des Denkers hemme ferner keine Schranke

Harald Graf submits in his wide-ranging thesis the first thorough analysis of the Schiller-reception in Sweden from its beginnings around 1790 till the Romantic and provides concurrently a multifarious panorama of the literary life in the late Enlightenment and the early Romantic in Sweden. The reappraisal of the Schiller-reception in Sweden – in the first place he was not received from the Romantic but from the Enlightenment philosophers and writers – is not only pertaining to the historic Schiller perception but also to the contours of the Swedish Enlightenment in general. Breaking up the underestimation of the Enlightenment in the Swedish literary studies, the years between 1790 and 1809 are construed as late Enlightenment, and this Enlightenment is not following the French model, as it often was claimed, but the German paradigm. According to the methodical direction in the intersection of the history of reception, literary sociology, conceptual history und New Historicism not only high literature is taking into account but also Schiller’s broad impact on the literary public in Sweden: Schiller was straight man of a generation, which liked to prevail against the dominant Zeitgeist.