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The origins of a philosophical genre theory in German

romanticism
a
Cyrus Hamlin
a
Yale University
Published online: 03 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Cyrus Hamlin (1994) The origins of a philosophical genre theory in German romanticism, European
Romantic Review, 5:1, 3-14, DOI: 10.1080/10509589408569981

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 The Origins of a Philosophical
Genre Theory in German
Romanticism

Cyrus Hamlin

What do we mean by philosophical genre theory? Within the context

of German thought during what has come to be labelled the Romantic era,
this question can be answered with some degree oí certainty. A theory of
genre developed at that time within the more general philosophical view
of art and literature under the heading of Aesthetics. In particular, through
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the impact of the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, above all the first
part of his third critique: Kritik der ästhetischen Urteilskraft (1790), a
comprehensive theory of poetry emerged with specific reference to the
concepts of the beautiful and the sublime. The outcome of this develop-
ment for theories of poetic genre, from the early writing of Fr. Schlegel
and Schelling through to Hegel and subsequent nineteenth-century theo-
rists, was a consistent claim that the natural and necessary subdivisions
of poetry, literature and the verbal arts in general are limited to three
essential modes or forms of discourse: the lyric, the epic and the dramatic.
How these three generic modes should be defined, how differentiated
from one another and above all how they are interrelated within actual
works of literature constitute the central concerns of what I am referring
to as philosophical genre theory.
There is no time in so brief a presentation as this must be to outline the
actual substance of these German theories of poetic genre, let alone to
attempt a comparison of various instances and their crucial differences
among each other. That must remain a topic for a future day. My concern
is addressed instead exclusively to the question of origin, which is in part
a straightforward problem of cultural and intellectual history. Yet even
this question proves to be vexing, primarily because of the complexity of
the actual scene of discourse within which these theories emerged and
because there is relatively little documentation about the kinds of personal

3
 4 CYRUS HAMUN

and often intimate interrelationships which provided the basis for the
origin and the development of this philosophical theory. The important
point to acknowledge here is that theory has indeed a history and that
ideas do not simply spring forth fullblown in the mind, as many of the
Romantic poets would have their readers believe about their own work,
on the model of familiar myths of creation from biblical or classical
sources. But we have no access to the living context for such collective
production, so that the question of origin, even at the simplest, most
positivistic level, yields only tentative and hypothetical solutions.
Equally problematic is the more substantive question of the origin of
philosophical genre theory with regard to the specific conceptual and
methodological needs to which these theories were a response. Why
should such theories have emerged all at once, as it were, within such a
highly determinate scene of discourse about art and poetry? What were
the basic presuppositions to which these theories were responding? Here
it may be possible to offer a few tentative and preliminary suggestions,
but I doubt that even among experts (whoever they might be) any consen-
sus would emerge. For the purposes of this paper therefore I must limit
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my remarks to the barest outline of several hypotheses.

The origin of a philosophical genre theory in German Romanticism

may, in one sense, be easily and fairly precisely located. It emerged during
the final decade of the eighteenth century at the University of Jena. Few
events in intellectual history may be so precisely defined. Nor can there
be any doubt that this development marked a radical shift in thought for
literary theory. For the first time in the history of criticism an attempt was
made to establish a philosophical foundation for theories of poetic form.
Not since Aristotle's Poetics, which had formulated a teleological theory
of tragedy as genre, based exclusively on the empirical evidence of the
Dionysian festivals in fifth-century Athens, was anything comparable
attempted. In Aristotle the concept of genre thus remained largely descrip-
tive, addressing the literary phenomenon as it had already been estab-
lished in the tradition of Greek culture. In Germany during the Romantic
era theory attempted to go beyond description, in order to define the
essential principles by which the different literary kinds could be distin-
guished—not on the basis of what had already been achieved in the history
of literature, but rather as a prescriptive program for subsequent poetic
production. Literary theory thus attempted to dictate what the practice of
the poets should and must be.
I have suggested that the origins for such innovative developments in
the theory of genre can be precisely located. Yet, equally, I would argue
 PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE THEORY IN GERMAN ROMANTICISM 5

that we can never know-precisely how such a theory came into existence.
We lack sufficient evidence to say just who may first have conceived such
a theory and why or how. Even more, no matter how complete the
documentation for this development might ideally become, circumstances
at that time and place remain necessarily marginal to the culture of the
age. The city of Jena consisted at that time of about four thousand
inhabitants, and the University did not enroll more than about eight
hundred students, most of whom studied Medicine and Law, or even
Theology, rather than Philosophy. We are concerned with a peculiar
cluster of individual minds, many of them still very young, who seem to
have come together at that time and place by mere chance.
Yet the configuration of productivity and originality during those few
years, extending for less than a decade, was so intensive and diverse that
no parallel example for such an explosive interaction between philosoph-
ical theory and poetic practice may readily be found throughout the entire
history of thought Having said this, I must also acknowledge a strange
paradoxical state of affairs in the current scene of critical and historical
scholarship with regard to this brief period of explosive creativity in
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poetic theory and practice.

A great deal of thorough and sophisticated research into these devel-
opments has occurred in recent decades. We need mention only the
scholarly work done in conjunction with the historical-critical editions of
such authors as Fr. Schlegel, Hölderlin, Fichte, not to mention Schiller,
Novalis or (more recently) Schelling, Schleiermacher and—perhaps most
of all—Hegel. Recently, furthermore, under the direction of Dieter
Henrich, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich, a team of
researchers has completed an intensive inquiry into the precise configu-
rations of influence and innovation that occurred during those few years
at Jena, which led to the emergence of Idealist philosophy. The results of
this research are just beginning to be published, with a monograph by
Henrich himself nearly 900 pages long concerning the role of the poet
Hölderlin for the rise of German Idealism during his six-month stay at
Jena during the winter and spring of 1795.
Interest in the question of genre theory by contrast (usually referred to
in German as Gattungstheorie) has largely waned and all but disappeared.
No comprehensive history of such theory has ever been attempted. The
influence of Romantic genre theory in our own time, furthermore, has
been rejected or ignored, especially in the English-speaking world, as
notably in the case of such treatises published soon after World War II as
Emil Staiger's Grundbegriffe der Poetik (1946) and Käte Hamburger's
Logik der Dichtung (19S7). A comprehensive negative judgement on such
theory was passed in a definitive essay published in the late 1960s by René
 6 CYRUS HAMLIN

Wellek, "Genre Theory, the Lyric and Erlebnis," included in the volume
of his essays entitled Discriminations. Paul Hemadi, in his monograph
Beyond Genre (1967), surveyed the entire modern history of genre theory,
focussing finally on the work of Georg Lukacs and Northrop Frye, only
to argue that the concerns of literary theory, largely under the influence
of structuralist linguistics and poetics, through the work of such theorists
as Roman Jakobson, had brought the tradition of genre theory, as it had
developed during the Romantic period, to a definitive conclusion.
One important exception to this decline of interest in German
Romantic genre theory is found in the work of Peter Szondi, whose
early death regrettably broke off the promise that he might undertake
a comprehensive study of the subject. One essay, entitled
"Gattungspoetik und Geschichtstheorie," focuses primarily on
Hölderlin's rather esoteric fragments, dating from 1799/1800, con-
cerning the different kinds of poetry (Unterschied der Dichtarten)—
designated as das lyrische, das epische and das dramatische—,
referring the claims of Hölderlin's theory to the presuppositions of a
general philosophical poetics. At the end of that essay, much too
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briefly, Szondi attempts to juxtapose Hölderlin's theory of genres with

those of Schiller (in his essay Ober naive und sentimentalische
Dichtung, published in his journal Die Horen at the end of 179S) and
Fr. Schlegel (in his literary fragments from the period of the journal
Das Athenaeum, which Schlegel co-edited with his brother August
Wilhelm from 1798 to 1800). Unfortunately this attempt at a compar-
ison does not go beyond a schematic juxtaposition of terms. Another
essay by Szondi from the mid-1960s, first published in French ("La
théorie des genres poétiques chez Frédéric Schlegel"), focuses the
theory of poetic genres on Schlegel's concept of Romantische Poesie
(from the famous Fragment 116 of Das Athenaeum) as a progressive
Universalpoesie and the subsequent claim that the novel {Roman)
transcends the distinctions of genre by combining and mixing all
forms.
Otherwise the focus of discussion concerning Romantic genre theory
has been limited primarily to work on the theoretical fragments of
Schlegel, largely in conjunction with the progress of the critical edition
(edited by Hans Eichner and Ernst Behler). Particularly challenging in
this regard is an essay by Werner Hamacher of 1980 (published in MLN
at Johns Hopkins) concerning the relationship of Schlegel's genre theory
to Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, "Der Satz der Gattung: Friedrich
Schlegels poetologische Umsetzung von Fichtes unbedingtem
Grundsatz." Hamacher also indicates in a footnote that his essay is only
the beginning of a projected inquiry into such theory, but to date nothing
 PHlLOSOPHICALGENRETHEORYINGERMANROMANTiaSM 7

further has been published. The source of such an inquiry into the relation
of Schlegel's theory of literature to Fichte may be found in the dissertation
of Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen
Romantik (1920), which has yet to appear in English translation. Central
to such inquiries—though I would not pretend to summarize Hamacher's
complex argument in a single sentence—is the role of self-reflection in
the production of poetic works of art, specifically with regard to the
fundamental incompatibility of the poetic imagination with philosophical
thought, resulting in the discontinuities and aporias of language in poetry
and constitutive of what Schlegel came to describe under the heading of
irony.

n
In large measure the inquiry into the origins of German genre theory
must be an attempt to place Schlegel more precisely in that intellectual
configuration of the mid-1790s, specifically with reference to the new
research that has been undertaken into the development of Idealist phi-
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losophy at the University of Jena. The tacit assumption that has often been
claimed by the chief celebrants of Schlegel as theorist is that he developed
his views virtually out of his own head. This is the case in particular for
the various essays published by Ernst Behler, and equally so for the
French translation of material from Dos Athenaeum published with ex-
tensive commentary in the late seventies by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe under the title L'absolue littéraire.
Just to indicate very briefly the directions of inquiry that might be
further pursued, let me emphasize the importance of the reception of Kant
at Jena prior to the arrival of Fichte in the summer of 1794. Equally
important as a counterforcc to Kantian rationalism was the impact of
Jacobi's celebration of Spinoza under the heading of a materialist panthe-
ism in his published Letters on Spinoza (1786). My own conviction,
furthermore, is that the work of Goethe, above all in natural science, who
returned to Weimar from Italy in 1789 and published his treatise On the
Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790, was also of great importance for the
intellectual climate in Jena at that time. Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre also appeared in four installments from early 1795 to early
1796 and had epochal impact on its readers, as Fr. Schlegel himself
emphasized in a well-known fragment, as also in his review of the novel,
both published in Das Athenaeum. Of particular importance for the theory
of genre are the discussions within Goethe's novel concerning the distinc-
tion between the novel and the drama as literary forms. That discussion
was further developed between Goethe and Schiller in their correspon-
dence, which led to the publication of a crucial short essay entitled "Über
 8 CYRUS HAMUN

epische und dramatische Dichtung," which cited both of them as joint

authors.
All of these works preceded the arrival of Schlegel on the scene in
1796, at which time he had already begun to publish essays on the history
of Greek literature in journals edited by the Berlin composer and publicist
Reichardt. Hölderlin had already left Jena before Schlegel arrived—and,
so far as I am aware, neither was even aware of the other's existence until
several years later. Schiller's theoretical essays, published in his journal
Die Horen in 1795/96, exerted a profound influence on Hölderlin's
thinking about poetry, though this has never been adequately explored in
detail. Hölderlin is generally credited (as Henrich so persuasively argues)
with mediating the philosophical theories of Fichte, not without signifi-
cant critical revisions, to both Schelling and Hegel. Schelling arrived at
Jena to assume an academic position as Professor of Philosophy in 1798,
largely on the basis of his recently published work on Naturphilosophie,
which was strongly endorsed by Goethe. Immanuel Niethammer, the
friend of all three fellow students from the Tübingen Seminary, Hölderlin,
Schelling and Hegel, was also teaching philosophy at Jena at that time
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and his Philosophisches Journal published a number of important essays

on the philosophy of the self, including the early work of Schelling. By
the time Schelling began his lecture course on Philosophie der Kunst in
the winter of 1799/1800, as is generally agreed, he had come under the
influence of the new ideas about Romanticism from the Schlegels, espe-
cially from August Wilhelm, who presumably introduced Schelling to a
number of major writers from European literature, including Dante. Hegel
did not arrive in Jena until 1801, by which time the development of the
new Romantic theories was virtually over, as Hegel himself seems to
acknowledge with regard to his own philosophical project as a kind of
systematic retrospect: the flight of Minerva's owl at dusk. But ultimately
it was Hegel, far more than the Schlegels, who established the canonical
view of German philosophical genre theory in his lectures on Aesthetics
at the University of Berlin during the 1820s, which were only published
posthumously during the 1830s in a greatly edited and expanded version
by his student H.G. Hotho.
Such a survey is superficial and far from complete, since I have not
even mentioned a number of important participants in the discourse on
literary theory at that time, such as Wieland and Herder, Wilhelm von
Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and Lud-
wig Tieck. But my brief remarks will serve to indicate just how complex
the challenge of sorting out priorities and differences of opinion must be.
In his ongoing work on philosophy at Jena Dieter Henrich has established
as model for the history of this epoch the notion of a field of thought,
 PHILOSOPHICAL GENRETHEORY IN GERMAN ROMANTICISM 9

where no linear sense of development can be isolated and where the

participation of any individual in the context of theory must be defined
by relations to the whole. That sense of a community is inscribed most
effectively in Fr. Schlegel's most important work of literary theory, his
Dialogue on Poetry, published in Das Athenaeum in 1800, where a vivid
evocation of the pluralistic scene of discourse is achieved, almost cer-
tainly modelled on the conversations which occurred in the home of his
brother at Jena, presided over by the two women who lived with them
there, Caroline Schlegel (August Wilhelm's wife) and Dorothea Veit
(daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, who came to Jena with Friedrich). The
women dominate the scene of dialogue, though neither of them offers a
text for discussion by the group, but they establish a sense of social
exchange as the medium of new ideas. There is an irony to such a social
medium for the exchange of ideas, which was not lost on Fr. Schlegel as
author of the Dialogue, since the very concept of independent and indi-
vidual authorship is thus eliminated. So where does one look within this
complex field of thought for the origins of a philosophical theory of poetic
genre?
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in
Three separate concerns contributed most of all to the emergence of
an interest in genre. To a degree it may also be possible to attribute each
of these concerns to a specific individual as agent of theory, if not as the
actual originator. Yet the crucial precondition for the impact of such
concerns on the discourse of philosophy resides in the general intellectual
scene of Jena at that time. What must it have been like to study philosophy
at that university during those years?
The concept of genre, first of all, was linked to general views of poetic
form as such. In this regard the development of Goethe's theory of
morphology in his scientific studies should be juxtaposed with related
philosophical views of form in nature, notably in Kant's Critique of
Teleological Judgement, which was published in the same year as Die
Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790). Of interest in this regard is Goethe's
comment to Eckermann, in their conversation dated April 11,1827, that
his scientific study of botanical form was fully compatible with Kant's
teachings. Goethe's notion of Gestalt, when applied to the work of art,
defines form, not as an abstract schema or norm to be imposed upon the
work as it is composed (such as the metrical form of a sonnet with its fixed
rhyme scheme), but rather the specific, individual and characteristic
shape of the work once it has been realized. Genre thus becomes a
principle of typology, or a general category, to which the individual
instance may be referred, as something fully realized yet distinctive, or
 10 CYRUS HAM1JN

even unique, in itself. In effect, the particular poem or work of art

constitutes in its own individuality and uniqueness something which is
also simultaneously generic and universal. Goethe's notions of typos and
Urphänomen are thus directly related to such a principle of genre.
Such a concept of form resembles Plato's doctrine of ideas, as has
occasionally been argued by scholars. A lyric poem or a novel, however
individualistic in its specific statement, would also manifest the generic
form which is inherent to its own identity. Insofar as this generic form is
fully realized by the individual work, however, we may also say that for
Goethe the principle of genre is defined as a natural, rather than an
artificial or arbitrary phenomenon. In effect, for Goethe the concept of
genre, or Gestalt, constitutes a naturalization of art, where the realization
of the work of art as form is essentially the same as that achieved by a
plant in its process of growth. Of interest in this regard is the fact that
Goethe, in his notes to the West-östlicher Divan (published in 1819),
speaks of the "natural forms of poetry" {Naturformen der Dichtung) as
Epos, Lyrik and Drama. In his late philosophical poem Urworte. Or-
phisch, he concludes the opening stanza on the Dämon by emphasizing
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that the individual human being also fulfills a law of form in the process
of growth, as Geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt. Such thinking
was not consciously applied to theories of the work of art as genre by
Goethe himself during the mid-1790s, but the influence of Goethe's
theory of form in nature most certainly was familiar to those who partic-
ipated in the intellectual milieu of Jena at that time.
Goethe has usually been excluded from discussions of Romantic liter-
ary theory in German, nor has the significance of the poet's work for the
philosophical developments that occurred in Jena at that time been ade-
quately acknowledged by scholars (including Henrich in his recent study
of Hölderlin). Nor would I want to argue that Goethe himself intended his
ideas about form, based upon his scientific study of plants, to be applied
directly to poetry and art. The sense of "natural forms of poetry," how-
ever, was crucial to the development of a Romantic poetics, whether the
critics and scholars or even Goethe himself recognized this. To this extent
the origin of a philosophical genre theory may truly be found in Goethe's
scientific views.
The second context of thought from which a theoretical concern for
poetic genres emerged may be called the theory of consciousness
(Bewußtsein) and its dialectical development, or education (Bildung), as
Ulis developed within Idealist philosophy during the first half of the
decade in Jena between Kant and Fichte. Precisely how this development
occurred is the central focus of research which Dieter Henrich's Jena-
project addresses and about which we may hope to learn much more very
 PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE THEORY IN GERMAN ROMANTICISM 11

soon. The specific application of such theory to a philosophical concept

of poetic or literary genres, however, may be located very precisely, at
least within the public domain of letters. Schiller is both the instigator and
the most powerful proponent of a model of literature based upon the
conditions of thought in the mind of the poet as they are reflected in the
language and the form of the literary work. His views on this are fully
formulated in his single most important theoretical essay in literary
theory, Ober naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, published in three
installments at the end of 1795 and the beginning of 1796 in his journal
Die Horen.
This is not the proper place to rehearse the basic tenets of the generic
distinctions made by Schiller in his essay, but a brief outline of the
fundamental distinctions introduced there may help clarify the central
point I wish to make about Schiller's contribution to genre theory. He
distinguishes between naive and sentimental poetry according to a funda-
mental contrast between the state of mind, or condition of thought, in the
poet which generates the poetic work. Either the poet speaks from within
a complete harmony and unity with nature or he speaks from a conscious
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sense of division, separation and opposition, which is the basis of a

necessary longing to reestablish such a unity. "Der Dichter . . . ist
entweder Natur, oder er wird sie suchen." The terms used by Schiller in
his title are perhaps unfortunate, though the traditions of eighteenth-cen-
tury psychology provide a context for both the naive and the sentimental
as categories of consciousness. Essentially, as most students of literary
theory recognize, Schiller's terms correspond very closely to those chosen
by the Schlegels several years later to define the essential contrast be-
tween ancient and modern art, namely the Classical and the Romantic.
Schiller goes to some lengths, however, to insist that his concern is not
with the history of literature and art but rather with the essential states of
mind which constitute the attitude or the sensibility of the individual poet
or artist
Strictly speaking, of course, Schiller refers the concept of genre exclu-
sively to the sentimental mode of poetry. He does refer at one point to the
distinction between naive and sentimental as one of Gattungen, but
essentially the naive—which, following an important argument by Peter
Szondi, is itself at best an idealized projection by the sentimental, like the
myth of a golden age or the Garden of Eden—resists all generic determi-
nation as primal and undifferentiated, both in the mind and in the poem.
The sentimental, however, is constituted—so Schiller argues brilliantly
in the middle section of his essay—by a conflict between the real and the
ideal, or between the self and its world, where consciousness perceives
nothing other than the incommensurability of the one with the other. The
 12 CYRUS HAMLJN

sentimental poet, argues Schiller, is defined by conscious reflection on

the fundamental opposition between the way things are and the way the
mind imagines they ought to be. This yields, as readers of Schiller's essay
well know, three essential generic forms for sentimental poetry: 1) Satire,
which reflects "the contradiction between reality and the ideal"; 2) Elegy,
which projects the ideal as something inaccessible or lost (like paradise),
for which one longs as the only source of value and affirmation; and 3)
Pastoral, which depicts the condition of innocence and happiness as a
conscious fiction in contrast to the reality of life in the world.
Schiller recognizes, and emphasizes in several key footnotes, that his
definition of these genres of the sentimental departs from the traditional
meanings of the terms he uses. The basis for the distinctions he makes, as
he himself insists, is exclusively the sensibility, or the kinds of feeling
{Empfindungsarten), which constitute and motivate the discourse of the
poem. Even more crucial, though Schiller only takes this for granted, is
the assumption that a poem or literary work is essentially constituted as
the representation in language of the inner state of mind, or mood, which
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it reflects and to which it refers. This assumption above all is what

recommends Schiller's theory of genre as central to Romantic thought
Such a concept of genre also indicates, in ways that have never been fully
clarified, the all-pervasive importance of Idealist philosophy for such
theory, as it had developed in Jena and was just then being made available
in published form in Fichte's Grundlage der gesamten
Wissenschaftslehre (1795). The structure of poetic form, as Schiller
defines it for sentimental poetry, is essentially the structure of the mind
in its dialectical processes of self-conscious thought, which the language
of the poem itself directly reflects, imitates and embodies. Here we may
locate the central theoretical insight of philosophical genre theory in
German Romanticism.
Third and last, the emergence of such genre theory in Jena during the
1790s resulted from new and radical approaches to the question of literary
history. For this above all Fr. Schlegel is responsible, though the impact
of his thinking was quickly appropriated by bis brother August Wilhelm
and disseminated during the following two decades throughout Europe as
a model for cultural history in general. The fact that we so confidently
speak of a period in European literary history as Romanticism, in ways
that the Schlegels themselves never intended, is one conspicuous conse-
quence of this dissemination. On the complex process of this development
I refer to René Wellek's famous essay on "The Concept of Romanticism,"
published in Comparative Literature (1949), and the definitive survey of
the European history of the term in the volume edited by Hans Eichner,
'Romantic' and Its Cognates. The European History of a Word (1972).
 PHILOSOPHICALGENRETHEORYINGERMANROMANTiaSM 13

During the years immediately preceding his move to Jena in 1796 Fr.
Schlegel was at work on a project he never completed, a comprehensive
history of ancient Greek literature, which he hoped would stand beside
Winckelmann's earlier history of Greek art. In the process of attempting
to define the inner structure of this history—as various oblique and often
very casual remarks by Schlegel in his Literary Notebooks make clear—
he came to view the history of literature as a sequential development of
generic forms, which could be distinguished from one another on quasi-
Kantian terms. The earliest form was epic, representing the objective
phase of Greek literature in the work of Homer and Hesiod. The second
form was lyric, representing the subjective form of Greek writing in the
work of various poets in the period just prior to the rise of Classical
Athens, such as Alcaeus and Sappho. The third and highest form of poetry
was drama, representing a balance and a combination between both
objective and subjective elements, in the works of Athenian tragedy and
comedy. The history of Greek literature, as Schlegel envisioned and
intended to trace it, was thus defined by a quasi-dialectical sequence of
generic forms, where the three basic literary genres of epic, lyric and
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drama were defined in their historical sequence (admittedly in rather

schematic and abstract ways) through their respective objective and
subjective components and the combination of both.
To this theory of poetic genre based on the historical development of
Greek literature should be added the emergence of a distinctly modern,
or Romantic, form in the novel. Once Schlegel moved to Jena and read
Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which he subsequently reviewed
in Dos Athenaeum in an essay crucial for the theory of the novel, he came
to define Romantic poetry, in historical contradistinction to Classical
poetry, as the programmatic mixing and combining of these three generic
forms, for which the modern novel in its essentially ironic mode served
as the model. "Der Roman ist ein romantisches Buch," so argued Schlegel
in a now famous pronouncement contained in the "Brief fiber den
Roman," included in his Gespräch Ober die Poesie of 1800.

IV
Having arrived at Schlegel's concept of literary genres, we have also
reached the point where the origin of a philosophical genre theory has
been achieved and the subsequent history of such theory within a Euro-
pean context might be traced. The essential claims of such a history and
the impact of such theory upon the practice of literary criticism and
literary history within the universities of the West up to the present time
have been all-pervasive. Our academic disciplines of literature as they
emerged in various contexts during the nineteenth century are largely
 14 CYRUS HAMLIN

determined by the theoretical assumptions which originated in German

Idealist philosophy at the University of Jena just before the turn of the
preceding century. Let us remind ourselves that the notion of a Romantic
period in literary history, especially in the field of English and at univer-
sities in Europe and North America, was completely unknown before the
early years of the present century. For the critical study of Romanticism
within the academy it would be instructive to reconsider the kinds of
assumption which such philosophical genre theories share and which have
entered into the thinking that is now largely taken for granted as historical
truth. Our view of literature, its genres and its history is still based, for
better or worse, upon philosophical theories of literature and art that
emerged in Germany, specifically at the University of Jena, during that
explosively creative decade in the 1790s.
My remarks in this paper have been all too tentative and incomplete.
We still need a comprehensive critical history of such philosophical genre
theory. Nor is it entirely clear to me how the separate contexts of thought,
which I have outlined here under three headings with reference to the
/ origin of such theory in the work of Goethe, Schiller and Fr. Schlegel,
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may be at all compatible with one another. My own surmise would be,
not without a strong sense of irony, that only Hegel in his lecture course
on Aesthetics at the University of Berlin during the 1820s succeeded—and
that only with remarkable dialectical sleights of hand—in gathering all
aspects of this theory together into a comprehensive philosophy of art.
None of us, I dare say, would feel entirely comfortable with the claim that
the basic structure of our own academic discipline, especially with regard
to our notions of generic form in literature, may still remain indebted to
the tradition of thought that produced such an all-subsuming system of
theory as that of the later Hegel.
Finally, I would like to suggest that this inquiry into the origins of a
philosophical theory of genre should give us pause to reconsider our own
basic assumptions about the literature of Romanticism and its generic
manifestations. I doubt that we will ever abandon the notion that Roman-
ticism really exists as a period in European cultural history and that the
distinctions we take for granted between lyric, epic (or narrative) and
dramatic poetry are somehow necessary to our concepts of criticism. Yet
all these are indeed at best the constructs of theory, which we as scholars
and historians must justify in ways that the poets themselves might well
deny. Nor can such constructs ever be free of certain ideological presup-
positions, which finally dictate the way we read and interpret literary texts
more than we might like to admit.

Yale University