Friedrich Schlegel is best known for the essays and aphorisms he published in the journal Athenäum (1798-1800), which he and his older brother August Wilhelm edited. The literary theory he developed in these texts is an important expression of early German Romanticism and is regarded today by many scholars as the first theory of modern European literature, that is, a literature no longer bound by set norms and traditional rules. Schlegel compared the new freedom which this theory proclaimed for literature with the new political freedom for which the French had just fought; he and his friends, particularly Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the pseudonym Novalis, saw the cultural revolution in Germany they heralded as one of the radical changes taking place throughout Europe--in philosophy and literature, in the sciences, and in the arts as well as in politics. But the same Friedrich Schlegel who...