The poetic fragment in the eighteenth century

Traditional literary history of the eighteenth century insists that there is no generic conceptualisation of the fragment, nor ar strategies of fragmentation used in the period that is dominated by Neo-classicism. Far from accepting this outdated view, the present essay reconsiders a variety of fragments (published as such) and sketches the different debates on Neo-classical perfection, regularity, as well as the structural unity of poetry. A number of neglected critics will be discussed in as far as they argue for an openness of form, (Pindaric) irregularity, the sublime, and, ultimately, a genre of the fragment that was not only used by prose writers but by poets who structured poetic compositions along lines formerly rejected by the prescriptiveness and structures of the Neo-classical tradition