Literary fragments may comprise:

• works inadvertently left unfinished or never completed by their authors
• surviving extracts of larger works subsequently lost as wholes
• works deliberately constructed as fragmentary pieces

The deliberately undeveloped literary fragment played an especially important role in literary Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

. German literature of the Romantic period has left many such fragments. In English literature, note Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...

's unfinished (but published as a fragment in 1816) "Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep in 1816...

; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" .