The present article investigates how G. Lukács's Theory of the romance (1916), a fragmented and of occasion text, became a classic of the reflection on modernity. For Lukács, the novel is the correspondent artistic form to the fracture between the subject and the world, lived by the contemporary man. Using the concept of "emptied symbol" this text apprehends how far the author, when reviewing the previous classifications on the genre of novel, perpetuates the romantic tradition or breaks it, elaborating original concepts for the understanding of modernity in literature.
Lukács; novel; modernity; romantism; simbolisation