The deconstructive force of Kleist's writing—whether in relationship to enlightenment philosophy, language (speech), classical and romantic aesthetics, or the law (civil, moral, divine)—is a central focus of contemporary Kleist criticism. As the title of this volume already announces, McAllister's study situates itself within this fruitful line of investigating Kleist's oeuvre, in his case works whose titles entail the names of the eponymous central female characters (“Das Bettelweib von Locarno,” “Die Marquise von O,” Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, and Penthesilea). The mention of idealist discourse in the title of the study hints at a form of literary criticism strongly anchored in philosophical investigation. Yet while McAllister indeed bases important conclusions of his investigation on particular concepts of idealist philosophy, e.g. Kant's theory of the sublime, Fichte's notion of individuality (self-definition), and Hegel's re-cognition in the masterslave dialectic, his investigation is theoretically much broader and includes a detailed analysis of the dynamics of gender relations through the prism of different (sometimes differing) feminist theories (Irigaray, Butler, Kristeva, Paglia).

The methodological double approach, recourse to philosophical concepts and use of feminist theory, allows McAllister a cohesive demonstration of his major objectives, namely to show the reader how Kleist, through his female title characters, undermines the concept of Darstellung, seen by the Jena Romantics (F. Schlegel, Novalis) “as a guarantor of effective representation”(5). Kleist's disavowal of representation (Darstellung) as the site of knowledge and truth also subverts epistemological certainties, including rigidly defined gender differentiations. Common to all female figures is a (self-willed) “process of subjugation, selfnegation, and dissolution” (168), a negative and disruptive counter model of representation inimical to epistemological stability and textual (aesthetic) closure. The fragmentary and ephemeral constructedness of Kleist's female figures points to an absence, a void at the core of idealist discourse and so reveals an essential aspect of Kleist's aesthetic theory.

McAllister partly ascribes the genesis of this dissenting aesthetic practice to Kleist's often-evoked Kantkrise. While Kleist seems to have suffered from the distressing effects of this crisis for the remainder of his life, it also “freed him from the normative definitions of morality, ethics, and gender, resulting in a frantic, fruitful ten years of literary production” (4). The other part of the explanation for Kleist's anti-idealist aesthetics is his own unsettled sexuality.