Schiller to Derrida is a historical critique of literary theory in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Starting with the work of Kant and Schiller, it traces an idealist tradition through nineteenth-century Romantic theory (including Wordsworth and Coleridge) and the New Critics to post-structuralists, notably Derrida. The book argues that these diverse and often apparently radical critics in fact only revise and distort Kant's idealist aesthetics. It shows how this dominant idealism has prejudiced critical opinion against certain non-idealist writers, and takes the example of John Clare as illustration.