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Overview
Romantic biography lives. Despite the so-called 'death of the author', popular interest in the lives of the major Romantic writers has reached a new peak.Romantic Biography brings together Romantic biographers and critics to consider some of the key questions surrounding this publishing phenomenon. What precisely is Romantic biography? What is the relationship between it and Romantic writings more generally? And to what extent is Romantic biography itself the product of Romantic ideas about the self, time and creativity?
Romantic Biography examines a range of canonical and non-canonical biographical subjects from a variety of practical and theoretical standpoints. Michael O'Neill opens the collection with an analysis of the relationship between Romantic biography and Romantic poetry. Jonathan Bate, Mark Storey and Kenneth R. Johnston reassess Clare, Southey and Wordsworth from their position as authors of recent/forthcoming biographies of the poets. Joe Bray and Alan Rawes explore the Romantic assumptions at work within contemporary biographies of Austen and Byron. Gerard Carruthers, Julian North, Jennifer Wallace and Arthur Bradley put biographies of Burns, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley into the context of contemporary historicist and theoretical ideas about national and gender identity, the body and difference. Ralph Pite brings the collection to a close with a further examination of the vexed question of Romantic biography's relation to Romanticism itself.
Romantic Biography is a major new survey of Romantic life-writing and an important contribution to biographical studies more generally.
Author Biography
About the Editors
Arthur Bradley, Department of English, Chester College of Higher Education, Chester, UK and Alan Rawes, Lecturer, Department of English, Canterbury Christ Church University College, Canterbury, UK
Synopsis
A curious subgenre of biography recounts the life of such Romantic writers as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, and Austen. Here, scholars of literature, all but one British, consider its theory and practice, its relationship to Romantic ideas generally, and its value for readers of Romantic poetry and other biography and for historians of the period. A consistent theme is that while Romantic biography adheres too closely to certain key Romantic assumptions and biography, it also neglects other equally important aspects of the vista. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR