Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments

<div> <p><i>Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments</i> was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.</p> <p>For the last century and a half Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) has enjoyed a reputation for being the critical grey eminence behind the coming to power of the Romantic Movement. It was Schlegel in his three series of aphoristic fragments (<i>Lyceum Athenaeum</i> and <i>Ideas)</i> who actually first defined and employed the word romantic in the present sense; and it was he who in a chaotic fragmentary and often mysterious but forceful manner first proclaimed the doctrine that was to usher in the modern age in literature. He too was among the first to put his new program into practice in the shape of his unfinished <i>Lucinde</i>a work variously denounced as pornography and heralded as a forerunner of modern novelistic experimentation and probably the most famous novel to come out of German Romanticism.</p> <p>Both the <i>Fragments</i> and <i>Lucinde</i>along with a brilliant <i>tour de force</i> the Essay on Incomprehensibility are available now for the first time in a complete English translation in this volume together with a brief scholarly introduction. This translation will enable non-German readers to examine at first hand the work of a man whom Rene Wellck has called one of the greatest critics of history. At a time when the function of criticism is coming once again under close skeptical scrutiny Friedrich Schlegel's unorthodox unsystematic but seminal critical mind-all of literature philosophy art and history were grist to his mill-should find many sympathetic readers. The book will be of particular interest to theorists of literature and fiction comparative literature scholars and historians of the intellectual history of Germany and it is appropriate for course use in German and comparative literature classes.</p> </div>