“Apotheosis of Poesy”: The blue flower as a Romantic theory of the novel

Penelope Fitzgerald’s The blue flower re-engages with Early German Romantic literary theory and develops her Romantic theory of the novel by fictionalizing Novalis’s formation as a poet. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, core members of Frühromantik (also Jena Romanticism), conceive Romantic poetry as poiesis, as aesthetic production of any art form. A Romantic theory of the novel must be immanent in the production of the novel. Fitzgerald’s advancement of the Romantic narrative theory harnesses the productive energy of the oscillation between the incomplete tendency of the fragments and the totalizing energy of pursuing the absolute. This tension between fragments and completion runs through the three stages of this study. Firstly, Fitzgerald figures the artist as the creative subject in her innovative combination of the Künstlerroman and the biographical novel to totalize the Romantic fragments. Secondly, she develops a narrative theory by restructuring the temporal structures of irony and allegory. Finally, she re-articulates Novalis’s pursuit of the philosophy of a universal language as Romantic poetry. Through a dialectic of the narrative content and form, she advances the Jena Romantic ideal of the novel as a theory of the novel.