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In 1800, Heinrich von Kleist visited a lending library in Würzburg and issued a report on the state of reading in Germany at the time. Requesting “a few good books . . . perhaps something by Wieland . . . or by Schiller, Goethe,” he was told that he would not be likely to find such works on the shelves. “Are all these books out?” he inquired, pleased at the good taste of the library’s patrons. “Not exactly,” replied the librarian, who proceeded to inform Kleist that his library did not carry such books. “Then what sort of books have you got here along all these walls?” the author asked quizzically. “Romances of chivalry, those and nothing else,” asserted the librarian, “To the right those with ghosts, to the left without ghosts, according to taste.”

The German reading public, it seems, just wasn’t reading works by the likes of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Kleist, but was much more interested in sensational ghost stories. What, given these circumstances, was a “high culture” author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, The Author, Art, and the Market, they set out to exorcise these ghosts from the sphere of “true” or “fine” art. Turning to the material conditions that underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details this process of theoretical exorcism and, in effect, conjures up the ghosts that eighteenth-century aestheticians sought to banish, bringing them back to haunt the philosophers and their theories.

The book’s first chapter, “The Interests in Disinterestedness,” traces the history of aesthetic theory from Moses Mendelssohn to Karl Philipp Moritz. Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn’s pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher’s enormously influential theories, removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis, responsible only for being a “coherent harmonious whole” (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn’s theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz’s theory of artistic autonomy through an examination of the “far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century” (p. 32). [End Page 965] As literature entered the marketplace, the public was found to favor ghost stories over “demanding” writers, and the instrumentalist theory of art worked to justify the wrong works: there were simply “too many readers . . . reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results” (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by “rescuing” art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales become the hallmark of “good” art. His “theology of art,” which adopted Pietist tactics to encourage reflective meditation on difficult texts, thus offered demanding writers “a very powerful set of concepts with which to address the predicament in which they found themselves” (p. 32), turning a defeat in the marketplace into a victory in the aesthetic realm—the “fine” arts were now precisely those that did not have a big impact on the public.

Having traced the impact of the newly developed marketplace on the definition of art, Woodmansee turns in her second chapter to an examination of its impact on the development of the modern concept of the author. As writers moved from an aristocratic patronage system to a democratic market-based system, attempting for the first time to earn a living on their own as professionals, they found the legal foundation necessary for this shift not yet in place. Germany had not yet developed a concept of intellectual property and, consequently, book piracy was rampant. In order to put an end to piracy and claim a portion of the profits from book sales for themselves, writers had to prove that ownership of a work extends beyond the mere physical foundation to which pirates had reduced it. Johann Gottlieb Fichte takes up this challenge, responding to the pirates in his essay “Proof of the Illegality of Reprinting: A Rationale and a Parable” (1793) by distinguishing among three aspects of a book: the content and physical aspects (the ideas in the book and the paper they are printed on, respectively) pass to the buyer with the sale of the book, but the form in which the ideas are presented remains the exclusive property of the author. Fichte thus “solves the philosophical puzzles to which defenders of piracy had recurred, and establishes the ground upon which the writer could lay claim to ownership of his work—could lay claim, that is, to authorship” (p. 52). Succeeding copyright legislation turned Fichte’s financially-motivated theory into law, demonstrating how contingent the modern definition of authorship is on the legal debate over intellectual property rights that surrounded eighteenth-century copyright legislation. Recent theory has made much of the “death” of the author; Woodmansee completes the sketch by narrating the story of the author’s birth.

At the center of Woodmansee’s book is a reading of Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters in the light of Schiller’s career that functions as a sort of case study of her reading of aesthetics and the marketplace. By turning to Schiller’s financial and material concerns, Woodmansee is able to explain the puzzling slippage in his enormously influential essay from the emancipatory and instrumentalist theory of art, presented in the early letters, to the narrowly entrenched and formalist theory of art presented in the later [End Page 966] letters. In explaining this shift, Woodmansee shows Schiller’s “extravagant claim for the power of art” (p. 57) to be a piece of “occasional” writing strongly influenced by the author’s own struggles to forge a career as a professional writer. Woodmansee grounds her claim by turning to Schiller’s changing opinion of his much more successful contemporary, the poet Gottfried August Bürger, who is best known today for his haunting ballad Lenore, but who was enormously popular in late eighteenth-century Europe and was a strong advocate of an instrumentalist theory of art, considering “broad accessibility essential to poetry” (p. 62). Though an early supporter of Bürger’s instrumentality, Schiller later, in a devastating, anonymously published review, charges the poet with opportunism that panders to “the childish understanding of the people” and threatens “the dignity of art” (quoted on p. 75), opposing Bürger’s “populist program for poetry” with what he terms an “art of the ideal” (p. 75). By the time he expanded on the ideas contained in the review in the Aesthetic Letters, Schiller had achieved a secure patronage in Weimar and was no longer subject to the laws of the market, providing him with the opportunity to make “a virtue of necessity” (p. 86) and celebrate an ideal art free of the constraints of the public and the need to sell books. Schiller’s aesthetic theory is thus shown to be as appropriate to the trajectory of his career as Bürger’s was to his own.

If Moritz, Fichte, and Schiller were interested in reforming the “supply side” of artistic production in response to the crisis of the new reading market, Johann Adam Bergk sought to work on the “demand side.” Woodmansee shows how Bergk’s hefty 416-page tome “The Art of Reading Books” (1799) was a response to Addison’s advocacy of widespread leisure reading in the early years of the century. Addison’s reckless call, as it became clear by the end of the century, had failed to specify the “how” and “what” of the activity, leading to the problem that Kleist encountered in the lending library: there were too many people reading too many “bad” books. Bergk seeks “to carry forward Addison’s project under the radically altered conditions of literature in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century” (p. 93) by expressly detailing not so much what should be read as how books should be read, advocating an active and creative reader who, he hoped, would “automatically make the ‘right’ choices” once he/she learned to read, becoming “too sophisticated to derive much pleasure from the growing literature of sheer diversion” and turning instead to classical authors for leisure reading (p. 100). It is in this climate of the Lesedebatte and reader-reform that Kant writes his Critique of Judgment (1790), which is traditionally read as “the fruit of a century of pure philosophical reflection on the arts,” (pp. 101–2) but is, as Woodmansee shows, grounded in the same cultural-historical conditions that prompted such “lesser” works as Bergk’s reading manual.

After a brief, but interesting, excursus on the role of gender in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory that focuses on the career of the first popular German woman writer, Sophie von La Roche, whose gender denied [End Page 967] her (theoretical) ownership of her works, Woodmansee ends her book with an examination of “The Uses of Kant in England.” Her reading of the trajectory of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s aesthetic theories shows the same retreat from instrumentality to formalism that she found at work among the German theorists: like aestheticians from Moritz on, Wordsworth and Coleridge “rescue” art from the public and once again validate the “classics.” Woodmansee ends her book by returning to the legal realm, detailing Wordsworth’s defense of the Copyright Bill of 1842, which in effect legislated his anti-market aesthetic theory of 1815 and encouraged the production of “difficult” art for posterity rather than for the contemporary book-buying public. The law had finally intervened and provided support for those who would “rescue” art from the market.

It is hard to overestimate the accomplishment of Woodmansee’s book. The study of aesthetics is, in the theoretical debates of our day, usually opposed to the study of culture, with critics choosing to focus on either one side or the other. In The Author, Art, and the Market, Woodmansee provides an exemplary model for integrating aesthetics and cultural studies, returning to texts that are usually read in the “tradition of great minds speaking with one another and above the historical process” (p. 7), and placing them alongside lesser known works and legal writings, in order to re-situate the bonafide canonical aesthetic treatises in the cultural-historical milieu in which they originated, and re-connect them to the practical and material concerns that prompted them. This re-situation not only breaks down the opposition between aesthetics and cultural studies; it also points toward the genesis of this very notion of an opposition between the two realms and shows us that the concept of aesthetic autonomy is, in fact, of very recent origin, but has “entrenched itself so thoroughly that we imagine it always to have existed” (p. 8).

Woodmansee’s examination of the foundational moment of aesthetic autonomy in eighteenth-century Germany is a powerful and important step toward a history of concepts of art that is sensitive to the historicity of such concepts and is, as she is well aware, just a piece of a much larger and very ambitious project. Other pivotal moments of “far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption” of art (p. 32) would benefit from a reading along the lines of Woodmansee’s model. The various attempts to make a space for film in twentieth-century aesthetics would, for instance, be ripe for such a reading. And we may, in fact, be at another pivotal moment right now, in which technology has raced ahead of theory and the law: I am thinking about the ongoing questions and problems concerning intellectual property in cyberspace. In her insistence that “art” is not a stable concept, but rather is contingent upon material concerns, Woodmansee points a way to treating this larger history, in whose legacy we live and which we help to fashion.