History, literature and anthropology in the German Late Enlightenment

Abstract

In analyzing Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers (1781), this article supports the thesis according to which the anthropological thought developed at the time of the German Late Enlightenment serves as a common ground not only to medical and historiographical discourses, but also to eighteenth-century literary production. In the first section, I investigate the foundations of the Enlightenment literary and medical cultures, as well as the debate on the concept of anthropology at that time. In the second and third sections I discuss contemporary research trends that explore points of contact between historical knowledge, anthropological thought and literary production in the Enlightenment. By doing so, this article concludes that Schiller’s representational strategies presented in The Robbers are a direct expression of the Enlightenment project which aims at understanding – in anthropological terms – the ‘whole of man’ and the whole history of mankind.