Jean Paul and The Fledging Years: A Theory of Roman

Abstract

When Friedrich Schlegel wrote Dialogue on Poetry (1800), Jean Paul Richter had not started writing The Fledging Years (Flegeljahre, 1804-1805) yet. He
was known by the Jena romantics and he had approached the readers after the publication of Hesperus, in 1795, after many years and some books
which went almost unnoticed. As we can read on Letter on the Novel, he is the contemporary –not including Goethe– who impacted on Schegel the most when it comes to establishing the guidelines for a theory of novel. In fact, Antonio’s reading on novel are a response to the criticism Amalia made of Jean Paul’s books. The objective of this short paper is to put Flegeljahre in a dialogical perspective with Schlegel’s theory of novel. From this point of view, Jean Paul would be answering to the other Friedrich, in conceiving a text that more than any text ever would seem to materialize in its formal and narratological aspects, as well as in the construction of the characters, all the attributes Schlegel wished for his theory of novel, that “should be a novel itself, which gave a
fantastic form to each eternal tone of fantasy, and muddled again the chaos of the world of chivalry”.