Cuadernos literarios

Between 1797 and 1800 (coinciding with his decisive works for the Athenäum magazine), Schlegel wrote down an extensive collection of commentaries on poetry and literary criticism that would remain unpublished until well into the 20th century. In them, we find revealing sentences related to the profession of criticism, the relationship between theory and history, the poetics of genres or hermeneutics. Since the last century, authorized critics unanimously agree that these posthumous fragments represent as important a theoretical contribution as the Lyceum and Athenäum series: they articulate a complex speculative reflection that anticipates themes later frequented by literary theory. They also clarify many of the questions raised by the excerpts edited during the author's lifetime, including his philological studies and his novel Lucinde. They constitute, in short, a corner piece in the literary thought of Schlegel and, therefore, of all Romanticism.