Maria Stuart: Schiller and Postmodernist Confrontation with Kantian Aesthetics and Historiography

The recent revival of Friedrich Schiller has pronounced his significance in modern cultural history, and has detected his voice to be compatible with the spiritual needs of our times. The present study explicates the separate theoretical notions of Aesthetics, historiography and tragedy adopted and embodied all into his historical play, Maria Stuart that comply with postmodernist imperatives for writing history. Postmodern historiography allows the use of sublime in the narration of history that yields to a pluralism of meaning. In his play, Schiller posits the notion of sublime, and adopts the revisionist historiography by incorporating inconceivability and not imposing a purport to the past, thus leaving it open as the postmodernist Hayden White has offered and which is in full contrast to the traditional closure aimed by the objective historian of the enlightenment and later modernism. Taking a step away from the contemporary Kant, Schiller makes a major contribution to the idea of sublime by placing it upon the human will rather than Kantian reason. The development of the philosophical idea of Sublime by Schiller is explored and found embodied in the female character of the play, Maria

کلیدواژه ها:

historical sublime ، inconceivability ، supremacy of will ، Kantian reason ، Hayden White ، postmodern historiography ، Aesthetics