Early German Romantic literary theory, as it developed during the last five or six years of the eighteenth century, certainly relates to the formation of the Romantic movement in Germany and Europe during the first decades of the nineteenth century and thereby participates in the great epochal change from the Enlightenment and the classicist doctrine to Romanticism. Yet, we can easily recognize features of this theory that make it an event of far greater significance than merely incepting Romanticism and relate it directly to the origin of our own modernity. Obviously the term ‘early Romanticism’ is a subsequent and retrospective designation unknown at the time when this theory arose. The original name for the phenomenon was ‘Romantic school’, but this label proved to be misleading because of its close association with the later Romantic movement in Germany. ‘Early Romanticism’, however, did not originate as a period designation until the beginning of our century and became an established category only during the latter half of it. The idea underlying this term is obviously to ascertain at the very beginning of the Romantic period a distinct body of thought and literature that is hard to bring into line with any other intellectual trend of the time. For want of a better name, but also because of the favoured use of the term ‘Romantic’ among its representatives, this brief phenomenon of decisive change gained the title ‘early Romanticism’.