Philosopher, literary critic, and theoretician, Johann Christoph Gottsched was Christian Wolff's disciple and one of the architects of the German Aufklärung. Particularly conscious of Germany's cultural shortcomings, compared to France and England, Gottsched worked vigorously to reform German theater and poetry. Taking the ancients (Aristotle, Horace) as models, but also the French "Grand Siècle" (Racine, Molière, Boileau) and some few national examples (such as Martin Opitz), he wrote his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst (1729, but often reedited until 1751) as a normative poetic theory destined to help form the taste of German writers and public alike. Gottsched's project, however, did not reduce itself to this pedagogical goal: His poetics was meant to ground the rules of poetic taste on systematic philosophical foundations inherited for the most part from Gottfried Leibniz and Christian von Wolff. He saw it as imperative for both...