MLR, 105.1, 2010 273 limited appeal to German philosophers, and his ideas were often assimilated to Wolffian rationalism. Two figures nevertheless continued to take him seriously, namely Wieland and Herder. He played a vital part inWieland's 'metamorphosis' in the early 1760s from ethereal religiosity to a combination of Platonic idealism and wry scepti cism, andWieland's fundamental concepts of 'moral grace', kalokagathia, and the 'virtuoso' are avowedly borrowed from Shaftesbury. In the frequent deflations, in Wieland's novels and poems, of obsessive idealists and Schwarmer, Shaftesbury's 'testof ridicule' is applied as a heuristic device to overcome delusion and restore the victim to normality. In short, from his 'metamorphosis' onwards, Wieland remained Shaftesbury's closest German adherent. For over a century, Shaftesbury's definition of the poet as 'a second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove' has been described as a major inspiration of the Sturm und Drang cult of genius and ofGoethe's presentation of Prometheus as a rebel against divine authority. It has also been claimed that Shaftesbury was the main source of the nature pantheism ofHerder and Goethe in the 1780s (thereby providing an Aryan substitute for Spinoza as an ancestor ofWeimar classicism). But as Dehrmann convincingly demonstrates, the young Herder's image, subse quently adopted byGoethe, of the genius as a defiant Prometheus stealing fire from heaven is derived not from Shaftesbury, whom he had not yet encountered, but fromEdward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. And although Herder's 'Hymn to Nature' ('Naturhymnus') of 1775 is based on its prose equivalent in Shaftesbury's 'Moralists', Shaftesbury's influencewas eclipsed by that of Spinoza in Herder's pantheistic speculations of the 1780s. This important book, based on prodigious research, performs twomajor func tions. By exhaustive documentation of references to Shaftesbury inGerman litera turebetween 1709 and 1781, itdemonstrates thathis influencewas greatest during the first half of the century. And by careful scrutiny of the aims, interests, and knowledge of each individual who cites him, it frees the study of Shaftesbury's reception from some long-lived and tendentious illusions. Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge H. B. Nisbet Der inszenierteHeld: Schillers dramenpoetische Anthropologie. ByNikolas Immer. (Jenaer Germanistische Forschungen, Neue Folge, 26) Heidelberg: Winter. 2008. 501pp. 59. ISBN 978-3-8253-5505-0. 'Schon wieder Schiller?' Thus commences Nikolas Immer's doctoral thesis,which was published, as luckwould have it,between two grand commemoration years: the bicentenary of Schiller's death in 2005, and the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth in 2009. However, Immer's monograph attests to the fact that dealing with Schiller?once again?does not necessarily overload themarket. On the contrary: the topic that the study isdevoted to, Schillers anthropological conception of the dramatic hero and heroine, should make us prick up our ears as Immer inhis book 274 Reviews Versucht, einen neuen Sinnhorizont [zu Schillers Dramenfiguren] zu erschliefien' (p. 15). The object of investigation is indeed a captivating one. What Schiller aims at, Immer convincingly asserts, is a humanized heroism that corresponds to Schillers study of the psyche: 'Und menschlich handelt, menschlich fuhlt der Held', to bor row the phrase from Schillers poem 'AnGothe als er den Mahomet von Voltaire auf die Biihne brachte' (1800). Meanwhile, the notion of the hero has enjoyed great popularity among both cultural and literary scholars, and it is Immer's merit comprehensively to tie this surge of secondary literature together. The approach to the topic is as systematic as it is extensive: what one might refer to as preli minary observations amount to 150 pages?an 'introduction, as itwere, that is impressively erudite, ifat times only indirectly related to Schiller. However, '[es] verlagert sich das Interesse vom statisch-vorbildhaften Helden auf den dynamisch gegenbildlichen' (p. 13), and it is precisely this gradual humanization of the hero in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that justifies a seemingly protracted treatment of thematter. Never did Schiller comprehensively reflect on the role of the dramatic hero or the heroine?a challenging fact ofwhich Immer is very much aware. It is to the advantage of the book that Immer himself acknowledges prospective reservations and objections with much care, with the result that his study avoids sliding into vagueness or improvident hypotheses. What...