 Given the importance Schlegel attaches within his romantic poetics to the novel and to the novel which gives itself its own criterion, critics have often examined Schlegel’s own novelistic efforts in light of his theoretical stance. The scandalous and unfinished Lucinde, subtitled “Confessions of a Blunderer,” was, according to Schlegel, an attempt at “shaped, artistic chaos,” a work that was meant to be “chaotic and yet systematic.” Part of the achievement of its “shaped chaos” is that Lucinde presents, within the form of a novelistic work itself , a romantic ‘contest’ of competing novelistic possibilities (see, for example, the interpretation of the famous chapter on the “Allegory of Impudence” in Behler 1993).