Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism

by Paul Fleming

Following Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, Paul Fleming investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to quotidian life--common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events--while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. He focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Lessing), the average artist...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804758905
• ISBN13: 9780804758901
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 9.1" x 6.3"