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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 5
... court illuminate the subjectivity of biographical interpretation : “ So dif- ferently are things seen , and so differently are they shown . " 35 The infor- mation in Johnson's Cowley was not new ; Sprat's account already had provided ...
... Court in 1784 for the adjudication of Johnson ( not knowing that Johnson was not to live many more weeks ) . Two years later in one of his earliest articles , D'Israeli proudly declared Johnson a " Hero " and “ THE AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY ...
... court fashions . Wordsworth faults Johnson for rising to the bait and attempting to " prove , by the sale of the work " Milton's recognition ; yet in this again he misreads Johnson to his own purposes . The issue of whether Milton's ...
Contents
Truth Is Not Here As In The Sciences | 18 |
Reading Cumulatively | 32 |
Connecting Lives and Works | 47 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown