Antiguidade e modernidade na Teoria do romance de Georg Lukács

This article aims to illuminate the contrast between ancient and modern world formulated by Lukács in his work The Theory of the Novel. In order to do this, we turn back to a debate on Aesthetics from the XVIII century Germany, where the search for the fundamentals of modern art leads the debate to the construction of a contrast between an organic culture, filled with meaning, located in a mythical conception of Greece, and a splitted and fragmented world, which corresponds to the modern era. Friedrich Schlegel’s reflections on this subject are taken into special account here, since he treated this comparison in a historical way more so than his contemporaries. Following this, we point to the specificities of Lukács’ approach to the issue, which is more attuned to the historical and social basis of the process that culminated in the loss of a unitary meaning for life in modernity. We seek to show how this perception makes possible for Lukács to point out the limits of the romantic solutions to the splitted character of modernity.