SOURCE: Nollendorfs, Cora Lee. “The Role of the ‘Aesthetic Subject’ in the Theoretical Writings of Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Aesthetics of Reception in the Eighteenth Century.” In Eighteenth-Century German Authors and Their Aesthetic Theories: Literature and the Other Arts, edited by Richard Critchfield and Wulf Koepke, pp. 203-19. Columbia: Camden House, 1988.

In the following essay, Nollendorfs outlines Humboldt and Schiller's ideas regarding the role of the reader or viewer of a work of art, noting Humboldt's success at outlining a receptivity theory that has continued to remain relevant through the years.

In Rezeptionsgeschichte: Grundlegung einer Theorie, published in 1977, Gunter Grimm calls for a reevaluation of eighteenth-century aesthetic theories along lines which would provide a theoretical basis for the aesthetics of reception.¹ Although eighteenth-century philosophers of aesthetics were concerned with other aspects of aesthetic theory—aesthetic taste, aesthetic judgment, and questions concerning the relationship between the...