Literary fragment

[3] Notable examples of writers of extant fragments of longer works include Sappho, Heraclitus, Sophocles, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Abydenus, Berossus, Sanchoniatho and Megasthenes.

[11] While the Romantic fragment evolved out of the much earlier writings of Montaigne, Pascal and the English and French moralist tradition,[12] scholars note that the fragmentary form was established by a group of German writers associated with the Jena school including Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis.

[3] The Jena Romantics, as well as Goethe, Nietzsche, Schiller and Walter Benjamin, saw the fragment as a literary form that offered freedom from the limitations imposed by traditional genres, had the potential to reject Enlightenment ways of thinking, and could reflect the fragmentary nature of existence while gesturing towards the future.

[13] Notable examples of authors that produced fragmentary work in the Romantic period include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

[16]Notable examples of authors that produced fragmentary work in the Modernist period include T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.

[22] The postmodern literary fragment is characterised by mosaic, montage, collage, polyphonic narrative and voices, multiple perspectives, pastiche, duplication, mirroring, and incompletion.

"[25] Notable examples of authors that produced fragmentary work in the Postmodern period include William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, B.S.

[20] Critics such as Shannon Callaghan note that the contemporary fragment offers a new way of representing marginalised identities and traumatic experiences outside of traditional narrative structures.