 Along with his somewhat idiosyncratic appropriation of literary modes, Schlegel offers a theory of the literary genres which undergoes considerable revision as he attempts to take account both of the historical development of forms and particularly of the rise of the modern novel. Moving from the pragmatic classifications of the Enlightenment to a philosophically oriented theory of the genres, Schlegel shifts from a view on which the drama (as “objective-subjective”) develops out of (“objective”) epic and (“subjective”) lyric to one on which the epic in fact unites the other two classical modes (Szondi 1986, 85–86). The new stress on the epic genre corresponds with his sense of the Roman or novel as the “modern epic” which transcends the traditional genres and with a fluid sense of genre classification itself: “One can just as well say that there exist infinitely many [genres] as that there exists only one progressive poetical genre.”