When Friedrich Schlegel published his novel Lucinde 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 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1796]. Until the twentieth century, scholarship did not appreciate Lucinde as a radical and experimental challenge to the aesthetic and moral conventions of the past. Yet in the …
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Citation: Hoffmeister, Gerhart. "Lucinde". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 February 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14270, accessed 21 November 2024.]
