This is an intellectually earnest and demanding book, as well as a piece of well-crafted scholarship. It deserves to become a central reference-point for those who wish to acquire a detailed understanding of the development of German idealist approaches to Greek tragedy against the background of larger aesthetic theories of the period. B.'s overarching aim is to argue that the idealists created a new style of philosophising about tragedy (and/or ‘the tragic’, a locution they popularised), new ways of finding meaning in tragedy, and that their ideas remain a vital element in our own conceptions of the genre. The infrastructure of the work consists of a series of close and scrupulously presented exegeses of individual texts by the major idealist thinkers, especially the Schlegel brothers, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin. B.'s endeavours of analysis and synthesis will certainly be instructive for anyone not fully conversant with all the texts at issue – in other words, most of us. But given the relentless proclivities for metaphysical abstraction which characterise, and in part define, German idealism, some students of Greek tragedy may none the less be left wondering exactly what is in it for them.

Very near the start of B.'s book, there are troubling signs of a pair of conflicting answers to this question. One is that ‘idealist theories substantially define the possibilities for reading tragedy in the present’ (p. 3): we are all, so to speak, idealists now (whether we like it or not, it seems). The other, however, is that ‘the possibilities of meaning [idealism] discovers’ (author's italics) ‘are importantly different from (though related to) the possibilities we actualize in reading ancient literature’ (p. 4). On the first view, idealism is said to form one of the ‘roots’ of our understanding; on the other, it exhibits ways of reading that are ‘other’ than ‘our own’ (p. 4). One cannot help feeling that B. has been himself somewhat infected by the idealists’ common vice of trying to have things both ways at the same time. The resulting uncertainty gives rise to a nagging concern about what we can and cannot expect to learn from the project.

After an introduction which outlines the key questions, the book is divided into three parts, ‘Tragic Modernities’, ‘Tragic Themes’ and ‘Tragic Texts’, though those titles do little to articulate a substantive structure of argument: they are equally and loosely applicable to all seven chapters. The organisation of the book is fundamentally chronological, with different phases of the same thinker's work sometimes being split across chapters. Chapters 1–2 prepare the ground with a well-documented account (including interesting remarks on Brumoy, Gottsched, Lessing and Herder) of how in the course of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, attitudes to tragedy were affected by increasingly historicising ways of thinking and by heightened reflection on the nature of modernity. Greek tragedy became the object simultaneously of close scrutiny yet also an awareness of historical distance. In addition to the gradual undermining of neoclassical practices, Aristotle's Poetics, which had underwritten those practices, became more open to challenge, though most idealists would never lose sight of it altogether and remained addicted in particular to speculative reinterpretations of the idea of catharsis.

In the book's three central chapters, B. sets the emergence of German idealism within the larger context of aesthetic theorising in the 1790s and beyond; the influence of Kantian philosophy is given obligatory prominence in the story and is fluently handled. Chapter 3 deals with some of the early writings of Schiller and Schelling (both of whom took the conflict between freedom and necessity to be of essential importance for metaphysics as well as politics) and with August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose lectures in Jena (1798) and Berlin (1801–3) started the process of turning idealist theory into something more like a literary-critical conception of tragedy as a genre. Chapter 4 concentrates on Friedrich Schlegel's views of the relationship between antiquity and modernity, on changes in Schiller's views of tragedy from 1797 onwards and on Schelling's lectures on Philosophy of Art (1802–5). Chapter 5 turns to Hegel and Hölderlin, who were friends in the late 1790s: both at this stage sought an aesthetic reconciliation between rationalist and revealed religion, and both subscribed to what B. calls a kind of ‘aesthetic Platonism’ in which beauty invests all reality with meaning. When their interests turned increasingly to tragedy, here too they looked for ways in which meaning and reconciliation might emerge from conflict. B. gives particular attention to a number of Hegel's early theological writings and to Hölderlin's unfinished tragedy, Empedocles. Understandably but not always fruitfully, B.'s focus in all these central chapters widens and narrows in keeping with his chosen material. The salience of tragedy itself varies accordingly: in Chapter 3, for instance, a section misleadingly subtitled ‘Schiller's System of Tragic Freedom’ covers mostly familiar ground in summarising the Aesthetic Letters of 1795, which virtually ignore tragedy, while its treatment of Concerning the Sublime (1801) blurs the fact that this essay contains only a single passing and general reference to tragedy as an art form.

The final two chapters carry the treatment of Hegel and Hölderlin further. In Chapter 6, B. prioritises Hegel's views on tragedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) over those in the later Lectures on Aesthetics (which survive only as a posthumous compilation). Scholarship on Hegel and tragedy is so bulky that B. inevitably finds it hard to break new ground here, but he does display an impressively proficient command of the ideas at stake and offers as lucid an analysis as one could hope for of the entanglement of Hegel's conception of tragic dialectic within a larger dialectic of the history of religion, politics and consciousness itself. But if Hegel's abstractions are daunting, Hölderlin's compressed aperçus on tragedy tread a thin line between quasi-poetic insight and something close to gibberish. In Chapter 7, B. tries valiantly to explain some of the most eccentric and opaque of Hölderlin's notes to his translations of Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus (1804), but the attempt meets much resistance. The book is rounded off by an ‘Exodos’ which makes selective observations on the aftermath and legacy of idealism, including Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.

There is no doubt about the interest and importance of German idealism for aesthetics in general and the philosophy of tragedy in particular. B.'s tightly integrated if occasionally heavy-going treatment of the subject is a useful addition to scholarship on the subject, even if some of its core theses remain debatable. The frequently repeated claim that the idealists ‘engaged profoundly with historical questions’ about tragedy (p. 163) is never made good (in the face of abundant evidence that they mostly treated history with cloudy vagueness). The programmatic assertion that their readings of tragedy, while often unconvincing as ‘historical scholarship’, none the less ‘make profound sense of the texts of Greek tragedy’ (p. 3), is peculiarly unconvincing, since idealism has very little to say about the ‘texts’ as such. Furthermore, approaches and attitudes to Greek tragedy have been exposed to many other movements of thought in the intervening period, and it is not as obvious to me as it is to B. that idealism retains a privileged position in the intellectual and historical frameworks through which the genre is interpreted. Even when modern scholars, critics and philosophers tackle issues which concerned the idealists, such as tragedy's complex grapplings with possibilities of freedom, they have other ways of doing so than via the idealists themselves: Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity is a case in point. The history of culture plays such cunning tricks that it is by no means self-evident that ‘we’ are closer to German idealism than we are to ancient Greece itself.