This text argues that some of romanticism's most daring innovations owe their form and substance to the subject of chemistry. Focusing on the work of Friedrich Schlegel, it demonstrates the degree to which romantic poetics, in its language and concepts, relies on the chemistry of its day.

Reconsidering Schlegel in this light, Chaouli shows how the chemical can be understood as a contribution to the history and theory of media: it registers the disquieting contact of human wants and nonhuman systems of archiving, the intersection of intentions and feelings with material systems such as language and writing--the very intersection that interests and involves us in literature.