The most-cited work connected to Friedrich Schlegel is his writing as a literary theorist and critic associated with German Romanticism, a movement he engaged with throughout his career as both a practitioner and a theorist working in the German language.

Schlegel was born in Hanover in March 1772, a citizen of the Electorate of Hanover. He studied at the University of Göttingen, and from there built a career that extended across a remarkably wide range of disciplines. He worked as a philosopher, literary critic, literary theorist, literary historian, art historian, art theorist, philologist, translator, poet, novelist, editor, and university teacher — all conducted in German. He is also described as an Indologist, pointing to intellectual interests that reached well beyond European literary culture.

His association with German Romanticism placed him at the centre of one of the major literary and philosophical movements of his era. As a literary critic and theorist, he engaged with questions that ran across several of the roles he occupied simultaneously — critic, historian, philosopher, and creative writer. His work as an editor and university teacher added further dimensions to a career that was unusually broad in its disciplinary reach.

Schlegel died in January 1829 — sources record the date as either the eleventh or twelfth of that month — in Dresden. His career had taken him from his origins as a citizen of Hanover through studies at Göttingen and into sustained activity across philosophy, philology, literary criticism, art history, and translation. The range of roles he occupied, from novelist and poet to art theorist and Indologist, reflects the scope of a working life conducted almost entirely in the German language and closely bound to the Romantic literary movement.