A Choice "Outstanding Academic Book for 1995" In a book of rare breadth of vision, Benjamin Bennett offers a new interpretation of the eighteenth century. He provides nuanced re-evaluations of Goethe, Herder, Hlderlin, Kleist, Lessing, Schiller, and Kant, as well as many other poets and philosophers. He seeks to trace the process by which modernity emerged in eighteenth-century German thought.