 The philosophical-literary reception of Novalis’s work first took off with Walter Benjamin’s 1919 study of the romantic notion of literary criticism. In situating the young romantics within the paradigm of Fichte’s philosophy of reflection, Benjamin places himself well within the traditional reception of their work. Nonetheless, Benjamin’s interest in philosophy of history, his recognition of philosophers such as Herder, Hamann, and Humboldt, and his general openness towards the late eighteenth-century mindset, makes it possible for him to transcend the framework of traditional (Hegelian) prejudices and tease out of the romantic idea of criticism a pregnant conception of art and subjectivity. Furthermore, because he views modernity as a period of aesthetic reflectivity and self-criticism, Benjamin is among the first to see in romantic philosophy a prefiguration of aesthetic modernism and the European avant-garde. This idea would later fuel the growing interest in German romantic philosophy amongst French intellectuals, including philosopher-poets like Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille, and, in the 1970s and 1980s, the chief proponents of literary deconstruction, Jacques Derrida and, in an Anglophone context, Paul de Man.