Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De QuinceyIn Prose in the Age of Poets, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli demonstrates that nonfictional narrative of the time was a central expression of British Romanticism. The rise of interest in the individual traditionally associated with Romantic autobiography was actually part of a wider cultural interest in biography--especially literary biography. Following Johnson's lead in the Lives of the Poets, virtually every major writer of the period experimented with sequences of short, anecdotal lives that became a characteristic Romantic vehicle for discussing theories of creativity, canon, and the place of the poet in society. The Romantics took in new directions the examination of the relation of artists' lives and works, biographers and their subjects, and texts and their readers. Romantic biography, Cafarelli contends, offers a perspective from which to reconsider conventional boundaries of genre, periodization, and the movement from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. In examining the Romantics as prose writers and biographers, Cafarelli explores the affiliations between Romantic theories of reading and writing and twentieth-century critical methodologies. She situates the biographical writings of the major poets, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, in the context of detailed analyses of biographies by Johnson, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Scott, Southey, and other lesser-known contemporaries. Prose in the Age of Poets will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, Johnson, biography and autobiography, and narrative theory. |
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... look in more detail , however , at the passage's troubling method- ological implications for the biographer reading the text of life . Boswell's hermeneutic quest for a univocal and fixed interpretation is confronted with opacity even ...
... look to Johnson's own order of composition for adjudica- tion , we find it largely irrelevant to the experience of the text , although it does bear some sequential resemblances ( if we disregard the insertion of the 1743 Life of Savage ...
... look of final dismission " ) — are events which " modified and varied by accident and custom would form very amusing scenes of biography . " This précis of embryonic scenes , sketched to recommend literary biography in 1760 , presaged ...
Contents
Truth Is Not Here As In The Sciences | 18 |
Reading Cumulatively | 32 |
Connecting Lives and Works | 47 |
Copyright | |
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