When Friedrich Schlegel published his novel

in 1799, at the dawn of German Romanticism, he caused a scandal because his readers identified the protagonists Julius and Lucinde as alter egos of the author and Dorothea Veit (1763-1839), a divorcee with whom the author lived in Berlin and Jena (they married in 1804). Critics objected to the arabesque form of the novel, which they considered a failure in the light of Goethe’s paradigmatic

[

, 1796]. Until the twentieth century, scholarship did not appreciate

as a radical and experimental challenge to the aesthetic and moral conventions of the past. Yet in the wake of the French Revolution, young Schlegel had set out to use the

(magic wand) of poetry to…

1647 words

Citation: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. "Lucinde". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 February 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14270, accessed 23 November 2024.]